Extract mentioned users in post like Facebook comment - laravel

Question

I followed this Laracast tutorial - https://laracasts.com/series/lets-build-a-forum-with-laravel/episodes/56 - to get "mentions" inside body. However I now want to fetch all the data for a thread, so I want all posts, and all related users, specifically mentioned users.
I am fetching all posts like this:
public function get(Thread $thread) {
return $thread->with(['posts'=>function($query) { return $query->with('user'); }]);
}
This returns to me data like this:
{
"id": 1,
"posts": [
{
"id": 1,
"user_id": 13,
"body": "Hi #14 and #15",
"user": {
"id": 13,
"name": "Joe"
}
},
{
"id": 2,
"user_id": 14,
"body": "Hi back at you"
"user": {
"id": 14,
"name": "Bob"
}
}
]
}
We see I get the author user's just fine. But I also need the mentioend users.
We see in the first one, during the store process, I converted #string to #USER_ID.
I did this in the store:
preg_match_all('/\#[^\s\.]+)/', $post->body, $matches);
And repalced with user_id.
Now however on fetch, I want to extract the user_id's from the post and attach to the resulting data these users. Is this possible?
My goal:
{
"id": 1,
"posts": [
{
"id": 1,
"user_id": 13,
"body": "Hi #14 and #15",
"users": [
{
"id": 13,
"name": "Joe"
},
{
"id": 14,
"name": "Bob"
},
{
"id": 15,
"name": "Ryan"
}
},
{
"id": 2,
"user_id": 14,
"body": "Hi back at you",
}
]
}
Is there a way to run the regex on each body and select the mentioned users too?

Answer 1

I think your goal isn't the correct one. You should think a good database design.
In your case, It's good to have mentions relation in your post (not users). Then you can attach the mentioned users to the post mentions. Something like,
preg_match_all('/\#[^\s\.]+)/', $post->body, $matches);
// get the author of the post
$author = $request->user();
// get all the user account for every #, except the author itself
$mentions = User::where(function ($query) use ($matches) {
foreach ($matches as $item) {
$query->orWhere('username', 'LIKE', $item);
}
})->where('id', '!=', $author->id)->get();
// attach the author to the post
$post->user()->save($author);
// attach $mentions to the post
$post->mentions()->saveMany($mentions);
// notify user were mentioned
Notification::send($mentions, new YouWereMentioned($post));
then to fetch the posts, you can do like so,
public function get(Thread $thread) {
return $thread->with([
'posts'=> function($query) {
return $query->with('user', 'mentions');
}
]);
}
Note. The laracasts video is only for the subscriber. You shouldn't make a question using a private resource. Or you must explain it all.