Check whether many-to-many relationship exists Laravel

Question

I have the following Models:

/* Team.php */

class Team extends Eloquent {

  public function users() {
    return $this->belongsToMany('User');
  }

}

/* User.php */

class User extends Eloquent {

  public function teams() {
    return $this->hasMany('Team');
  }

}

and database structure:

teams
  id
  user_id
  name

users
  id
  email

team_user
  id
  team_id
  user_id

A user can create (and own - hence teams.user_id) a team, but also belong to other teams.

If possible, I'd like to be able to get all the teams for a particular user using Eloquent without doing a custom SQL query like so:

 SELECT teams.* 
 FROM teams 
 JOIN team_user 
 ON (team_user.team_id = teams.id) 
 WHERE team_user.user_id = ?

The custom SQL query works but I'm convinced this isn't the native way to go about this in Laravel.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance for reading.

Answer 1

To answer to the question in the title, here is how you define a boolean function in the user model to know if the relation exists in the pivot table 'team_user':

public function isPartOfThe($team)
{
    return $this->teams()->where('team_id', $team->id)->exists();
}

Then you can call the function in your controller as follow:

If($user->isPartOfThe($team)
{
    //true
}