With Eloquent its very easy to retrieve relational data. Checkout the following example with your scenario in Laravel 5.
We have three models:
1) Article (belongs to user and category)
2) Category (has many articles)
3) User (has many articles)
1) Article.php
<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Eloquent;
class Article extends Eloquent{
protected $table = 'articles';
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\Models\User');
}
public function category()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\Models\Category');
}
}
2) Category.php
<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Eloquent;
class Category extends Eloquent
{
protected $table = "categories";
public function articles()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\Models\Article');
}
}
3) User.php
<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Eloquent;
class User extends Eloquent
{
protected $table = 'users';
public function articles()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\Models\Article');
}
}
You need to understand your database relation and setup in models. User has many articles. Category has many articles. Articles belong to user and category. Once you setup the relationships in Laravel, it becomes easy to retrieve the related information.
For example, if you want to retrieve an article by using the user and category, you would need to write:
$article = \App\Models\Article::with(['user','category'])->first();
and you can use this like so:
//retrieve user name
$article->user->user_name
//retrieve category name
$article->category->category_name
In another case, you might need to retrieve all the articles within a category, or retrieve all of a specific user`s articles. You can write it like this:
$categories = \App\Models\Category::with('articles')->get();
$users = \App\Models\Category::with('users')->get();
You can learn more at http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/eloquent