How to add additional column relationship in pivot table in Laravel - laravel

Question

Version: Laravel 5.4
I have 3 Models
Model: Employee
protected $fillable = ['name'];
public function emails(){
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Email')->using('App\EmailEmployee');
}
Model: Email
protected $fillable = ['username'];
public function employees(){
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Employee')->using('App\EmailEmployee');
}
Every Employee has many email access and emails allocates to many employees. But I have another column in email_employee table
email_id (emails table)
employee_id (employees table)
assigned_by (employees table)
how to make relation of assigned_by column with employees table
Pivot Model
use \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Pivot;
class EmailEmployee extends Pivot{
public function assignedBy(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Employee');
}
}
I tried
$email = Email::find(1);
dd($email->employee[0]->pivot->assignedBy);
But not working

Answer 1

Custom Intermediate Table Model
To solve your problem, you should look to use the ->using() method on the belongsToMany method.
The subsection "Defining Custom Intermediate Table Models" in this link briefly describes this. eloquent-relationships#many-to-many
You basically create a model for the pivot table so that you can define additional relations to it.
You can still access data from Blade and Controllers the way you are now as Laravel will still deal with the relationship for you. However, you can access the pivot table with ->pivot and as you have told laravel to use a model for the pivot table, you can also access all the relationship defined functions from that model.
Example:
Employee
class Employee extends Model
{
protected $fillable = ['name'];
public function emails(){
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Email')
->using('App\PivotModel');
}
}
Email
class Email extends Model
{
protected $fillable = ['username'];
public function employees(){
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Employee')
->using('App\PivotModel');
}
}
PivotModel
class EmailEmployee extends Pivot
{
public function assignedBy(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Employee','assigned_by');
}
}
Be Sure to extend Pivot on the pivot model and not Model
Now you can just do:
$user->emails()->first()->pivot->assignedBy
The reason for the ->first() is that you have a many to many, meaning that you will be getting a collection of emails assigned to the user. You would normally loop through them but for this example, simply selecting the first will do the same.
If you just want the column value and not the relationship value, then add ->withPivot('assigned_by') which will allow you to access the value directly.
If you are wanting to audit when the assignment was made, then you may also want to add ->withTimestamps() if your pivot table has timestamps included, so that you can access those too.

Answer 2

Changes in Pivot model
Pivot Model
use \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Pivot;
class EmailEmployee extends Pivot{
public function assignedBy(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Employee','assigned_by');
}
}

Answer 3

You can use an custom pivot model
EmailEmployee
class EmailEmployee extends Pivot
{
public function giver()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\Employee');
}
}
Employee
class Employee extends Model
{
public function emails(){
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Email')->using('App\EmailEmployee');
}
}
Email
class Email extends Model
{
public function employees()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Employee')->using('App\EmailEmployee');
}
}
So you can access giver by $email->pivot->giver;