Laravel Removing Pivot data in many to many relationship

Not sure if I set this up correctly. In Laravel I'm creating two models with a many-to-may relationship

The models are Item and Tags. Each one contains a belongsTo to the other.

When I run a query like so:

Item::with('tags')->get();

It returns the collection of items, with each item containing a tags collection. However the each tag in the collection also contains pivot data which I don't need. Here it is in json format:

[{
    "id":"49",
    "slug":"test",
    "order":"0","tags":[
        {"id":"3","name":"Blah","pivot":{"item_id":"49","tag_id":"3"}},
        {"id":"13","name":"Moo","pivot":{"item_id":"49","tag_id":"13"}}
    ]
}]

Is there anyway to prevent this data from getting at

You have asked and you shall receive your answer. But first a few words to sum up the comment section. I personally don't know why you would want / need to do this. I understand if you want to hide it from the output but not selecting it from the DB really has no real benefit. Sure, less data will be transferred and the DB server has a tiny tiny bit less work to do, but you won't notice that in any way.

However it is possible. It's not very pretty though, since you have to override the belongsToMany class.

First, the new relation class:

class BelongsToManyPivotless extends BelongsToMany {
    /**
     * Hydrate the pivot table relationship on the models.
     *
     * @param  array  $models
     * @return void
     */
    protected function hydratePivotRelation(array $models)
    {
        // do nothing
    }

    /**
     * Get the pivot columns for the relation.
     *
     * @return array
     */
    protected function getAliasedPivotColumns()
    {
        return array();
    }
}

As you can see this class is overriding two methods. hydratePivotRelation would normally create the pivot model and fill it with data. getAliasedPivotColumns would return an array of all columns to select from the pivot table.

Now we need to get this integrated into our model. I suggest you use a BaseModel class for this but it also works in the model directly.

class BaseModel extends Eloquent {

    public function belongsToManyPivotless($related, $table = null, $foreignKey = null, $otherKey = null, $relation = null){
        if (is_null($relation))
        {
            $relation = $this->getBelongsToManyCaller();
        }

        $foreignKey = $foreignKey ?: $this->getForeignKey();

        $instance = new $related;

        $otherKey = $otherKey ?: $instance->getForeignKey();

        if (is_null($table))
        {
            $table = $this->joiningTable($related);
        }

        $query = $instance->newQuery();

        return new BelongsToManyPivotless($query, $this, $table, $foreignKey, $otherKey, $relation);
    }
}

I edited the comments out for brevity but otherwise the method is just like belongsToMany from Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model. Of course except the relation class that gets created. Here we use our own BelongsToManyPivotless.

And finally, this is how you use it:

class Item extends BaseModel {
    public function tags(){
        return $this->belongsToManyPivotless('Tag');
    }
}