Laravel - Selecting specific columns on many-to-many relationships

Question

I have two models in my Laravel 4.2 web application, User and Group. A user can be a member of many groups, and a group can have many members. Both models are thus joined with a many-to-many relationship:

<?php
    class User extends Eloquent {
        public function groups()
        {
            return $this->belongsToMany('Group');
        }
    }

    class Group extends Eloquent {
        public function users()
        {
            return $this->belongsToMany('User');
        }
    }
?>

One of my API resources is /groups, which lists all groups available within the app:

<?php
    $groups = Group::with('users')->all();
?>

This works, however in the JSON response each user contains all fields from the users table (excluding of course those in the $hidden attribute). I would like this relationship to return only a specific set of fields instead of the whole table.

In other relationship types I can easily achieve this with the following statement (assume now that users may belong to only one group):

<?php
    public function users()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('User')->select(['id', 'first_name', 'last_name']);
    }
?>

However the above does not seem to work with many-to-many relationships. I came across this question which apparently refers to the same issue and it looks like this was not possible in Laravel 4.1. The author of the chosen answer, tptcat, provides a link to an issue on Laravel's Github issue tracker, but the link is no longer working and I couldn't figure whether this issue is still open in 4.2.

Has anybody come across this and successfully managed to solve it?

Tharindu Mahesh · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-26 04:55:46Z

3

{
   return $this->belongsToMany('User')->select(array('id', 'name'));
}

use this

answered Nov 26, 2020 at 4:55

Tharindu Mahesh

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user3774430 · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-01 04:48:04Z

0

The all method takes in an array of column names as a parameter.

If you look at the source, it takes * (which means everything) by default.

https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/4.2/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php#L624-L629

You can pass in the columns that you needed and it should return the results only with the specified columns.

<?php

$groups = Group::with('users')->all(array('first_column', 'third_column'));

answered Jul 1, 2014 at 4:48

user3774430

2 Comments

cafonso Over a year ago

Yes, this does work. However, if I make similar queries in different actions throughout my controller I have to pass the same array to all of them. I was aiming for a solution similar to what can be done with other kinds of relationships.

user3774430 Over a year ago

You can always create a function that does these common queries in your model and call it from the different actions in your controllers.

Vivek Pandey · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-28 15:57:02Z

0

Use like this.

<?php
    class User extends Eloquent {
        public function groups()
        {
            return $this->belongsToMany('Group')->select(array('id', 'name'));
        }
    }

    class Group extends Eloquent {
        public function users()
        {
            return $this->belongsToMany('User')->select(array('id', 'name'));
        }
    }
?>

answered Sep 28, 2014 at 15:57

Vivek Pandey

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Comments

Masood Khan · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-17 13:10:06Z

0

Instead of selecting column in relationship, you can select column as below:

$groups = Group::with('users:id,first_name,last_name')->all();

And when you are selecting column in relationship, make sure that you are selected foreign key of relation table

answered Sep 17, 2019 at 13:10

Masood Khan

6354 silver badges8 bronze badges

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