How to use Many To Many Eloquent Relationship in Laravel

In this tutorial, i would like to explain many to many model relationship in laravel. Many to many relationship is a little bit complicated than one to one and one to many relationships. An example of such a relationship is a user with may have multiple roles, where the role are also connected with multiple users.

In this example, you can understand how to create many-to-many relationships with migration with a foreign key schema for one to many relationships, use sync with a pivot table, create records, attach records, get all records, delete, update, where condition and everything related to many to many relationship.

Many to Many Relationship will use "belongsToMany()" for relation.

In this example, i will create "users", "roles" and "role_user" tables. each table is connected with each other. now we will create many to many relationships with each other by using the laravel Eloquent Model. We will first create database migration, then model, retrieve records and then how to create records too.

Create Migrations:

users table migration:

Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {

$table->increments('id');

$table->string('name');

$table->string('email')->unique();

$table->string('password');

$table->rememberToken();

$table->timestamps();

});

roles table migration:

Schema::create('roles', function (Blueprint $table) {

$table->increments('id');

$table->string('name');

$table->timestamps();

});

role_user table migration:

Schema::create('role_user', function (Blueprint $table) {

$table->integer('user_id')->unsigned();

$table->integer('role_id')->unsigned();

$table->foreign('user_id')->references('id')->on('users')

->onDelete('cascade');

$table->foreign('role_id')->references('id')->on('roles')

->onDelete('cascade');

});

Create Models:

Here, we will create User, Role and UserRole table model. we will also use "belongsToMany()" for relationship of both model.

User Model:

<?php
 
namespace App;
 
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notifiable;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
 
class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use Notifiable;
 
    /**
     * The attributes that are mass assignable.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $fillable = [
        'name', 'email', 'password',
    ];
 
    /**
     * The attributes that should be hidden for arrays.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $hidden = [
        'password', 'remember_token',
    ];
 
    /**
     * The roles that belong to the user.
     */
    public function roles()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Role::class, 'role_user');
    }
}

Role Model:

<?php
 
namespace App;
 
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
 
class Role extends Model
{
    /**
     * The users that belong to the role.
     */
    public function users()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(User::class, 'role_user');
    }
}

Defining Custom Intermediate Table Models:

If you would like to define a custom model to represent the intermediate table of your relationship, you may call the using method when defining the relationship. Custom many-to-many pivot models should extend the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Pivot class while custom polymorphic many-to-many pivot models should extend the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\MorphPivot class. For example, we may define a Role which uses a custom RoleUser pivot model:

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Role extends Model
{
    /**
     * The users that belong to the role.
     */
    public function users()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('App\User')->using('App\RoleUser');
    }
}

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Pivot;

class UserRole extends Pivot
{

}

You can combine using and withPivot in order to retrieve columns from the intermediate table. For example, you may retrieve the created_by and updated_by columns from the RoleUser pivot table by passing the column names to the withPivot method:

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Role extends Model
{
    /**
     * The users that belong to the role.
     */
    public function users()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('App\User')
                        ->using('App\RoleUser')
                        ->withPivot([
                            'created_by',
                            'updated_by',
                        ]);
    }
}

Retrieve Records:

Retrieve roles from User object:

$roles = User::find(1)->roles;    

Retrieve users from Role object:

$users = Role::find(1)->users;

Like all other relationship types, you may call the roles method to continue chaining query constraints onto the relationship:

$roles = App\User::find(1)->roles()->orderBy('name')->get();

Create Records:

Example 1:

$user = User::find(2);

$roleIds = [1, 2];

$user->roles()->attach($roleIds);

Example 2:

$user = User::find(3);

$roleIds = [1, 2];

$user->roles()->sync($roleIds);

Example 3:

$role = Role::find(1);

$userIds = [10, 11];

$role->users()->attach($userIds);

Example 4:


$role = Role::find(2);

$userIds = [10, 11];

$role->users()->sync($userIds);

Retrieving Intermediate Table Columns:

$user = App\User::find(1);

foreach ($user->roles as $role) {
    echo $role->pivot->created_at;
}

Filtering Relationships Via Intermediate Table Columns

You can also filter the results returned by belongsToMany using the wherePivot, wherePivotIn, and wherePivotNotIn methods when defining the relationship:

return $this->belongsToMany('App\Role')->wherePivot('approved', 1);

return $this->belongsToMany('App\Role')->wherePivotIn('priority', [1, 2]);

return $this->belongsToMany('App\Role')->wherePivotNotIn('priority', [1, 2]);

I hope you found this article useful. let me know if you have any questions and I’ll be happy to answer them.