Can Laravel 4 relations use different databases - laravel-4

Question

At work we use Nagios for our monitoring platform and we have an in house written configuration generator.
I am planning on re-writing this using Laravel 4. Our setup is that we support multiple clients who all will have their own configuration. For security reason we have each clients configuration stored in a separate database and the database credentials are supplied to the front end using environment variables in the Apache configuration (each client is using a different TCP port).
The problem is that for each client there are database tables that are common to every client i.e. Time Periods, Contacts, etc. At present if we want to change a common item we have to do this on all databases manually (although I have scripted this from the cli)
I wish to separate out the common elements into one database and and have the client specific items in their own database.
I know that Laravel is capable of easily having more than one database connection but my question is is it possible to create Eloquent relationships between tables in two different databases.
An example would be a Service in the client database has a timeperiod_id column which is a foreign key to the primary key in the timeperiod table in shared database.
I want to be able to seamlessly do something like below in the controller (with the approriate relations in the model.
$services = Service::all();
and in the blade template view
#foreach ($services as $service)
{{ $service->name }}
{{ $service->timeperiod->name }}
#endforeach
The Laravel documentation and google dont seem to shed any light on whether this is possible.
Any help greatly appreciated

Answer 1

I am currently doing this in one of my laravel projects.
you can specify a foreign key to match on and also a different primary key if you want.
class TimePeriod extends Eloquent {
protected $connection = 'some_Db';
protected $table = 'time_period';
protected $primaryKey = 'id';//can set this to anything, will default to auto incr id(optional)
public function Services() {
return $this->hasone('Services', 'time_period_id');//specify the foreign key as second param
}
}
class Services extends Eloquent {
protected $connection = 'client';
protected $table = 'services';
public function TimePeriod() {
return $this->belongsto('TimePeriod', 'id');//specify the foreign key as second param
}
}