Displaying product variants - laravel

Question

I have an online store that sells clothes. Each items (ex: T-shirt) have two attributes, colors and sizes. I'm combining the three tables together in a variants table, that has the following structure :
- item_id
- color_id
- size_id
- price
- stock
This works and I'm using a hasMany() relationship between the items and the variants (an item has many variants) and then a belongsTo() relationship between each variants and the colors/sizes (each variants belong to a color and to a size).
Here's the code I'm using to fetch all the items :
$items = Item::with(['variants', 'variants.color', 'variants.size'])->get();
Here's a sample of the returned data : http://pastebin.com/CjsYp6wS
The problem I have is with displaying this data. I want to display each item in a table, and for each item have two select boxes : one that shows all the colors, one that shows all the sizes. The user can then choose a color and a size, and see the updated price for this variant.
However, because of the way my relationships are setup, if I want to display all the colors and all the sizes, I have to do something like this :
<select name="color">
#foreach($item->variants as $variant)
<option value="{{ $variant->color->id }}">{{ $variant->color->name }}</option>
#endforeach
</select>
This is far from ideal, since it results in duplicated values for each colors and sizes if they happen to be in two or more variants.
Is there a better way to do this? I'm thinking that there has to be a simpler way to do it, with a different database structure or Eloquent relationships or something.

Answer 1

You can store all the values you are displaying in an array and check if you have already displayed that value and if you have displayed it, you can skip it. In that case you code should look like:
<select name="color">
<?php $color_array=[]; ?>
#foreach($item->variants as $variant)
#if(!in_array($variant->color->id,$color_array)
<option value="{{ $variant->color->id }}">{{ $variant->color->name }}</option>
<?php array_push($color_array,$variant->color->id); ?>
#endif
#endforeach
</select>
This will make it check if the value entered is already entered in the array before displaying it. If it is not entered, then it will display it and add it into array else it will not do anything and skip to next entry.You can do the same for size or any other attribute also. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Select the item, get the item_id:
$items=Item::all();
<select name="iem">
#foreach($items as $item)
<option value="{{ $item->id }}">{{ $item->name }}</option>
#endforeach
</select>
Select the color, get the color_id:
$colors=Color::all();
<select name="color">
#foreach($colors as $color)
<option value="{{ $color->id }}">{{ $color->name }}</option>
#endforeach
</select>
Select the size, get the size_id:
$sizes=Size::all();
<select name="color">
#foreach($sizes as $size)
<option value="{{ $size->id }}">{{ $size->name }}</option>
#endforeach
</select>
Fetch the price having that item_id, color_id and size_id from variants table:
$variant=Variant::where[('item_id'=>$item_id)]->where[('size_id'=>$size_id)]->where[('size_id'=>$size_id)]->first();
print_r($variant->price);