Eloquent Relationships
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Eloquent makes the process of interacting with your database tables as natural and intuitive as possible. It’s vital that you recognize and understand six key relationship types. Let’s review them all – one episode per relationship.
One to One
First up, we have “one to one” relationships. This is an easy one to picture in your head. What is one thing that a user might be associated with? What about a profile, or an address, or an avatar?
One to Many
Now that we have “one-to-one” relationships locked and loaded, let’s move on to our next Eloquent relationship: “one-to-many.” What might be an example of something a user would have many of? What about posts, or projects, or tasks? You’ll reach for this relationship constantly in your daily workflow.
Many to Many
Many to many relationships are a bit more confusing to understand. Let’s break it down by reviewing the common “posts” and “tags” relationship. A one-to-one or one-to-many relationship isn’t quite right here. A post will never own a tag. It can be associated with one, sure, but it doesn’t own the tag. The same is true in reverse. When we encounter situations such as this, a “many-to-many” relationship is exactly what we need.
Has Many Through
While not nearly as common, the hasManyThrough relationship, when necessary, can prove to be incredibly useful. This relationship type allows you to perform queries across long-distance relationships.
Polymorphic Relations
We’ve made it to the scariest of Eloquent relations: polymorphic. Don’t worry! As with most things, the word is scarier than the technique. A polymorphic relationship allows a model to belong to any number of models on a single association. Let’s demonstrate this with a practical example.
Many to Many Polymorphic Relations
We’ve finally made it to the most intimidating of Eloquent relationships: many to many polymorphic. Don’t worry
it’s far simpler to understand than you might initially think. In this lesson, we’ll construct a standard many-to-many relationship: a user can “like” a post. Then, we’ll throw a wrench into the mix. What if a user can also “like” a comment? How might we restructure our existing structure to allow for this?
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