Pagination with relationships - laravel

Question

I'm having problems returning the data for two relationships when using paginate.
$things = $this->model->with('fruits')->with('animals')->paginate(5, ['id, 'name']);
Returns the "things" I want but the "fruits" and "animals" arrays are empty.
To clarify, the relationships check out, things "has Many" fruits and also "has many through (fruits)" animals.
public function fruits()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\Fruit');
}
public function animals()
{
return $this->hasManyThrough('\App\Animal', '\App\Fruit');
}
I would like to be able to load "things" along with any relationships while being able to paginate the "things"

Answer 1

with() only tells Eloquent to pre-fetch the related models, so you can avoid the N+1 query problem. It does not mean that when you return the model, that information is also returned.
I would create an Eloquent Resource:
Class FruitResource extends \Illuminate\Http\Resources\Json\Resource {
public function toArray($request) {
return [
'id' => $this->id,
'name' => $this->name
];
}
}
Class AnimalResource extends \Illuminate\Http\Resources\Json\Resource {
public function toArray($request) {
return [
'id' => $this->id,
'name' => $this->name
];
}
}
Class ThingResource extends \Illuminate\Http\Resources\Json\Resource {
public function toArray($request) {
return [
'id' => $this->id,
'fruits' => FruitResource::collection($this->fruits),
'animals' => AnimalResource::collection($this->animals)
];
}
}
Once you created these resource, you can alter your controller to do the following:
$things = $this->model->with('fruits')->with('animals')->paginate(5, ['id, 'name']);
return ThingsResource::make($things);
By structuring your resources, you can easily get more control on what you return. Make life a lot nicer...