Trying to achieve a hasManyThrough type relationship - laravel

Question

I'm trying to achieve something that is similar to Laravel's hasManyThrough, but I'm not sure my DB is set up appropriately or I'm just missing something.
I am trying to display a page for admins to show all of the sites we support. I would like to have a simple column that shows a distinct count of how many customers are attached to each site. To do this, I was going to go through the orders table and retrieve a distinct list of users, then simply use the ->count() method inside my view.
Here is my DB setup (simplified):
sites table (primary key: 'id'):
id | ...
users table (primary key: 'id'):
id | first_name | last_name | ...
orders table (primary key: 'order'):
id | order | user_id | site_id | ....
Site model:
public function customers()
{
return $this->hasManyThrough('App\User', 'App\Order', 'site_id', ' id')->distinct();
}
I realize right away that the key difference between my DB setup and the documentation is I do not have an order_id in my users table, but it doesn't make sense that I do since a user can have many orders.
It is worth noting: I also have a table user_orders. I'm not sure if I should be using that instead. user_orders has the following set up:
id | user_id | order
You can see that it is simply an intermediate table to hold connections between users and orders (remember order is the PK in orders, not id).
So, can anyone help me understand what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

You could get away with a Join. I give you this sample code to guide you
public function customers()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\Order')
->leftjoin('users', 'users.id', 'orders.user_id')
->groupBy('users.id'); //Is this needed?
//Above code will return you a collection of Order though, but with the user data.
//Let's try using the User model
return App\User::whereHas('orders', function($query) use ($this->id) {
$query->where('site_id', $this->id);
})->get();
}