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Amit Merchant

Amit Merchant

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Fetch count of records for children relationships in Laravel Eloquent

There comes a time when you want to fetch the number of records for a child relationship along with the main Eloquent query.

For instance, let’s say, I want to get the number of books and publications when fetching authors. To do so, we can use withCount method on the Eloquent model like so.

$authors = app\Author::withCount(['books', 'publications'])->get();

Now, when looping over this, we can get the count for these child relationship records by using a {relation}_count column on the iteration instance like so.

foreach ($authors as $author) {
    $totalBooks = $author->books_count;

    $totalPublications = $author->publications_count;
}

You can use alias (using as) and Closures to utilize the same relationship twice in withCount for different constraints like so.

$authors = app\Author::withCount([
    'books', 
    'books as published_books_count' => function (Builder $query) {
        $query->where('status', 'published');
    }
])->get();

The aliased count column can be accessed like so.

$author->published_books_count;

You can learn more about this feature here.

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