Attach, detach and sync many-to-many relationships in Laravel
There exists four types of relationship associated between models/entities. And they are: One To One, One To Many, Many To One and Many To Many. We’re specifically going to talk about Many To Many relationship and most importantly attach, detach and sync helper methods that are provided in Laravel in this article.
What is a “Many to Many” relationship?
A relationship betweeen two entities is called as Many to Many when multiple records in a table are associated with multiple records in another table.
For instance, let’s say we have two entities Books and Authors. If you carefully observe this relationship, you’ll notice that a book “can” have multiple authors and an author “has” written multiple books. In this case, you have many books related to many authors.
So, If we want to define a relationship between these two entities we’ll need three database tables: books, authors and a special table called as a “pivot table” book_author. The book_author table is derived from the alphabetical order of the related model names, and contains the book_id and author_id columns.
And here’s how we can define the relationship in the Laravel model using belongsToMany method:
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Book extends Model
{
/**
* The authors that belong to the book.
*/
public function authors()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Author');
}
}
We can define the model for Author the same way. Now once the relationship is defined, you can access the books all authors like so:
$book = App\Book::find(1);
foreach ($book->authors as $author) {
dd($author->name);
}
Now, back to the intended topic of this article. Laravel comes with handy little helper methods called attach, detach and sync in order to add certain amount of convenience for Many To Many relationships. Let’s review them one by one.
The attach method
This specific helper method can be used to attach a certain entity record to the other entity record in the pivot table. For instance, in above example, if we want to attach an author to a book, we can use attach method which will insert a related record in the pivot/intermediate table like so:
$book = App\Book::find(1);
$book->authors()->attach($authorId);
You can also pass additional data in attach method if you want to update additional fields in the intermediate table.
$book = App\Book::find(1);
$book->authors()->attach($authorId, ['best_seller' => true]);
The detach method
Similarly, if you want to remove a certain entity relationship from the pivot table, you can use detach method. For instance, if you want to remove a certain author from a book you can do like so.
$book->authors()->detach($authorId);
Or you can pass multiple IDs as an array.
$book->authors()->detach([4, 5, 8]);
Of if you want to remove all authors from a book, use detach without passing any arguments.
$book->authors()->detach();
The sync method
The sync helper method is like intersection of attach and detach method. So, basically what this method can be used to establish Many to many association. That is it will only keep the association which are passed to it as an array like so.
$book->authors()->sync([5, 2, 10]);
Any IDs that are not in the given array will be removed from the pivot table. So, only association that will be left in the pivot table would be [5, 2, 10] in the above example for books and authors.
If you do not want to detach existing IDs, you may use the syncWithoutDetaching method:
$book->authors()->syncWithoutDetaching([1, 2, 3]);
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