Laravel - Friendship

Question

I'm trying to do a friendship system in laravel 5 and I'm stuck. I have a friends_user table which look like this:

id
user_id
friend_id
status

Here is the point, I go to an user page, and Ii wanna see how is my relation with this user, 4 solutions:

We are friends
We're not
He doesn't have accepted the request yet
I have to confirm or not.

I wanna create a method that checks if a user is friend with an other, simple. I have a 'status' column which is a boolean (0 for pending and 1 for friends) The perfect solution for me would be to be able in one method to check if:

The users are friend, so either ('user_id', Auth::user()->id)->and ('friend_id', $friend->id) or the inverse ('user_id', $friend->id)->and ('friend_id', Auth::user()->id), it has to check in the 2 senses
I sent request and have to wait for his answer
I received the request and have to accept it.
We're not friend and so, i can add him.

So if you can tell me where i'm wrong here, here's my logic (just for check if users are friend) : User.php

    public function isFriend($slug)
{
    // Get both user
    $user = Auth::user();
    $receiver = User::where('slug', $slug)->first();
    // get list of friends (so who have status = 1)
    $result = Friends::where('status', 1);
    // Get users where user id is equal to connected
    $result = $result->where('user_id', $user->id)->where('friend_id', $receiver->id);
    $result = $result->orWhere('user_id', $receiver->id)->where('friend_id', $user->id);
    $result = $result->get();
    if(count($result) == 0)
        return false;
    return true;
}

After I do these checks in my view.

This works pretty much, but only if i (the current user) has sent the request but if it's the inverse it returns me the user even if status is at 0. I think that my $result erase the other ones isn't it? What's the solution so?

I hope it's clear, and if you can tell me how do this in a clean way, it would be great.

Check out this series.. laracasts.com/series/build-a-laravel-app-from-scratch There is a lesson in there about friends — bretterer
You're messing things a little bit why do you have a Friends table? A friend isn't user? if so why don't you have a many to many self relationship on the users table? — Fabio Antunes
@bretterer You need to get a subscription to access the video. (But if you want to learn about laravel and php, this is a very good way to invest $9) — Needpoule
No, there is no Friends table, only a friends_user to store each friendship entries. I did the many to many, I can get users i added, users who add me, but i can't get status of a friendship with a particular friend, i can't pass parameters to my method. The method who gets all the friend I added is : public function friendsOfMine() { return $this->belongsToMany('App\User', 'friends_user', 'user_id', 'friend_id') ->wherePivot('status', '=', 1) ->withPivot('status'); } — Azilhan

Eduardo Stuart Eduardo Stuart · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-23T15:00:50

That's a common mistake. Beware of your "orWhere" clause.

public function isFriend($slug)
{
    // Get both user
    $user = Auth::user();
    $receiver = User::where('slug', $slug)->first();
    // get list of friends (so who have status = 1)

    $result = Friends::where('status',1)->where(function($query) use ($receiver,$user)
    {
        $query->where([
            'user_id'   => $user->id,
            'friend_id' => $receiver_id
        ])->orWhere([
            'user_id'   => $receiver->id,
            'friend_id' => $user->id
        ]);

    })->get();

    return ! $result->isEmpty();
}

Laravel - Friendship

1 Answers