Laravel many-to-many relationship with varying options - laravel

Question

I am new to Laravel and am attempting to set up a many to many relationship (at least I think that's what I need)
Essentially each user have preferences there are 7 types of preferences some preferences can have multiple values and some have only one value
Here are the user_pref_options
project_type | ( will be checkboxes on view and have multiple options)
favorite | (a user can have multiple this is a foreign key to another table)
tagline | ( will be checkboxes on view and have multiple options)
bedroom_min | (a single value per user)
bedroom_max | (a single value per user)
sf_min | (a single value per user)
sf_max | (a single value per user)
and here is what the user_pref table has
| id | user_id | pref_option_id | value |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| 3 | 1 | 2 | 364 |
| 4 | 1 | 2 | 201 |
| 5 | 1 | 2 | 9 |
| 6 | 1 | 2 | 244 |
| 7 | 1 | 2 | 192 |
| 8 | 1 | 2 | 292 |
| 9 | 1 | 4 | 1 |
| 10 | 1 | 11 | 1 |
| 11 | 1 | 12 | 6 |
| 12 | 1 | 13 | 1628 |
| 13 | 1 | 14 | 9134 |
so that would be 1 users notice how some option types have multiples
sorry I had to lay a lot of background before I ask my question.
I would like to be able to connect the user prefs to the user using Eloquent and am having trouble figuring out which way it should be done..
here is what I have tried
//User model
public function prefs(){
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Pref', 'pref_user', 'user_id', 'pref_id');
}
and
//Pref Model
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Pref', 'pref_user', 'user_id', 'pref_id');
}
I have taken a look here
I would like to be able to get all the preferences and display them on a view
(I won't bore you by pasting that in here now)
my struggle is that some of the preferences have multiple options and some have single options. How do I retrieve the values
maybe I need to separate each preference type to its own model but that seems like overkill I am open to suggestions

Answer 1

user_pref table makes it difficult to distinguish between your prefs and also sets a lot of overhead data.
So, you can set the single value prefs (bedroom_min, bedroom_max, sf_min and sf_max) in user model or in separated model and retrieve them with user. And for other prefs, many-to-many relation is better and more flexible.
Finally, When you fetch User model, you will get the model and its relations.