Fetch results based on the existence of the relationship in Laravel Eloquoent
If you want to check if the eloquoent model has certain relationship or not and fetch the results accordingly while querying upon it, you can do this by two approaches in the Laravel Eloquent.
- By using
hasmethod to check the existence of the relationship - By using
doesntHavemethod to check the absence of the relationship
We’ll take a look at both of the approaches one by one.
Check existence of relationships
Let’s say you want to fetch only users which have atleast posted a single photo. You can do this by by passing the name of the relationship to the has method on the User model.
// Retrieve all users that have at least one photo uploaded...
$users = App\User::has('photos')->get();
You can further filter down the results by providing an operator and count into the has method. For instance, in above example, if you want to retrieve only users which have uploaded 5 or more photos, you can do this like this.
$users = App\User::has('photos', '>=', 5)->get();
You can also attach more relationships using “dot” notation for checking existence of nested relationships. For instance, if you want to retrieve users with photos with comments on it, you can do this like this.
// Retrieve all users that have at least one photo with comments on it...
$users = App\User::has('photos.comments')->get();
If you want to also add conditions on the relationship itself, you can do this by whereHas or orWhereHas methods in which you can pass in the condition using a Closure to the second parameter of the whereHas or orWhereHas method.
For, instance if you want to fetch all the users which are from “Arizona” state, you can do this like this.
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
// Retrieve users with at least one address containing state like arizona%...
$users = App\User::whereHas('addresses', function (Builder $query) {
$query->where('state', 'like', 'arizona%');
})->get();
Check absense of relationships
Similar to checking the existence of the relationship on the certain model, you can check the absence of certain relationships and fetch the results accordingly. For this purpose, Eloquoent provides doesntHave and orDoesntHave methods.
For instance in the previous example if you want to fetch only users which don’t have a single photo. You can do this by by passing the name of the relationship to the doesntHave method on the User model.
// Retrieve all users that don't have a photo...
$users = App\User::doesntHave('photos')->get();
If you want to filterise the query by applying the contarints on the relationship, you can further use whereDoesntHave and orWhereDoesntHave methods to put “where” conditions on your doesntHave queries.
For, instance if you want to fetch all the users which are not from “Arizona” state, you can do this like this.
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
// Retrieve users with at least one address containing state like arizona%...
$users = App\User::whereDoesntHave('addresses', function (Builder $query) {
$query->where('state', 'like', 'arizona%');
})->get();
You can also use “dot” notion to make a nested relationship and execute the query against it. For instance, if you want to retrive users whose photos have comment authors which are active. You can do this like following:
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
$users = App\User::whereDoesntHave('photos.comments.author', function (Builder $query) {
$query->where('active', 0);
})->get();
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