Eloquent uses wrong foreign key with belongsTo even after dump-autoload

Level 60

What's your tables structure?

1 like

SilenceBringer

Level 55

@cooperino

*Edit: Looks like the Observer code is not updating from some reason

what you mean?

1 like

Level 122

change your model name to singular

try and stick with conventions, you will experience far less issues

1 like

MichalOravec

https://github.com/alexeymezenin/laravel-best-practices#follow-laravel-naming-conventions

Level 75

Follow Laravel naming conventions!!!

Level 122

this seems off

public function phone()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Users::class,'user_id');
    }

if this code is in the Phone model then i expect it to be called user()

if in the User model then it would be phones() and be a hasMany to the Phone model

1 like

Level 3

@Snapey sorry, I copied it wrong, I fixed the main post already (you can see my comment down with more data)

Level 3

@michaloravec @sergiu17 @silencebringer @snapey thank you.

I am sticking to conventions, however previous devs did not and I can not change it now (the plan is to change in the future). But I do write in singular. So now there are some mixed places:

The Users model has this:

    public function phone()
    {
        return $this->hasOne(Phone::class);
    }

The Phone model:

public function user()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Users::class, 'user_id');
    }

So even though not everything is according to convention, that's why there is the option to use foreign_key. But still it recognizes the plural term from some reason.

The queries that seem to fail are: (Inside the UsersObserver)

$users->phone->update(['user_id' => $users->id]);

and

$users->phone->id

But.. why? Why it says:

(PDOException(code: 42S22): SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'phones.users_id'

Where does it see both as plural?

Level 122

this makes no sense

$users->phone->update(['user_id' => $users->id]);

find the phone associated with this user (by the foreign key) and set the foreign key to the same thing you found it by

so you could just delete this line?

1 like

Level 3

@Snapey In this part of the code the user has a phone_id but the Phone does not yet have the user_id saved, it's still NULL in this case. So it means if I get to that point something is wrong?

Because before I update the phone's user_id, I do some checks and only the I save the user_id for this phone

But now that I think of it, it's wrong since I can't use that relationship (yet) when the other one is still NULL, so I have to update it using query builder and not eloquent, right?

Best Answer

Level 122

@cooperino you should never have models with keys pointing to each other

1 like

Level 3

@Snapey makes sense, thank you. I changed it to

$phone = Phone::where('id', '=', $users->phone_id);
$phone->update(['user_id' => $users->id]);

Update: It's working

1 like

Level 3

@snapey I also changed my relationship to belongsTo on the Users instead of hasOne:

    public function phone()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Phone::class);
    }

and it now even works when I leave it as:

$users->phone->update(['user_id' => $users->id]);

In case of having both belongsTo, is it ok to leave the above? Or it's not a good practice and I should still not point like so and use

$phone = Phone::where('id', '=', $users->phone_id);
$phone->update(['user_id' => $users->id]);