Eloquent Relationships, linking of models (Laravel 5.4)

Question

I'm kinda confused how the eloquent relationships works in Laravel 5.4. I got a school model that has a "hasMany" relationship with my user model:

public function users()
{
    return $this->hasMany('App\User');
}

The user is not required to be linked to a school though, so I haven't put the belongsTo (school) function on my user model.

How should I link the user to a school, when I create the user and how can I pull all users in a specific school into a view, for example?

I would start here: laravel.com/docs/5.4/eloquent-relationships. The docs do a pretty good job walking through the basic concepts. — jackel414

jackel414 jackel414 · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-05T19:27:40

If the user can only belong to one school, the most straightforward approach would be to add a school_id column to the users table. Since it's not required, you can allow for it to be null. This will allow you to run $school->users to retrieve a list of users for a given school.

I would also recommend adding the belongsTo relationship to the User model, so you can do $user->school to retrieve a user's school when applicable. It's okay that it'll be null for some users.

Eloquent Relationships, linking of models (Laravel 5.4)

1 Answers