Fetch users with their unread messages with Laravel Join vs Laravel Eloquent - laravel

Question

I 'm working on a chat application. I am fetching all the users to show in the sidebar. With each user fetched I also want to show an indication of unread messages from any user. I have the messages table like this.
id | user_id | receiver_id | message | is_read
and standard users table of Laravel. I achieved it with the following join in the the controller method.
public function users_join()
{
// get logged in user
$user = Auth::id();
// left join to get all users all time
return DB::table('users')->where('users.id', '!=', $user)
->leftJoin('messages', function ($join) use ($user) {
// first evaluate where in below function
$join->on('users.id', '=', 'messages.user_id')
// filter messages sent to current user
->where('messages.receiver_id', '=', $user)
// get only those messages which are unread
->where('messages.is_read', '=', 0);
})->select('users.*', 'messages.user_id', 'messages.receiver_id', 'messages.message'
, 'messages.is_read')
// finally grouped by email to get only 10 records from users table
->orderBy('messages.created_at', 'DESC')->groupBy('email')->get();
}
Now I want to do it with the Laravel Eloquent. I can't think of any other way of doing this without using loop. Here is the code for that.
public function users_eloquent()
{
// get current user
$current_user = Auth::id();
// each through all users except current
$users = User::all()->except($current_user)->each(function ($user) use ($current_user) {
// laravel relationship
$user->messages = $user->messages()
// messages sent to me
->where('receiver_id', $current_user)
// unread message sent to me
->where('is_read', 0)
// get latest unread message
->orderBy('created_at', 'DESC')
// first latest message
->first();
});
// send back the response
return $users;
}
My User Model is like this
public function messages()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\Message');
}
and just in case, my Message Model is like this
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\User');
}
I want to achieve it with Eloquent without using each loop. How can I do this?
I have all the users in sidebar and their unread mark. Below is the attached screenshot.
Thanks!

Answer 1

You don't need to loop all the users.
You can find the user except current_user by where() method on Eloquent model before it become collection.
And use with() to get the latest msg for those users:
$current_user = Auth::id();
return User::where('id', '<>', $current_user)
->with(['messages' => function($q) use ($current_user) {
$q->where('receiver_id', $current_user)
->where('is_read', 0)
->latest()
->first();
}])->get();