[SOLVED] Clarification with eager loading/mutators/accessors for laravel

Clarification with eager loading/mutators/accessors for laravel

I'm making a laravel app for work and I need to load all users with their attached role without any nesting of the roles. I used this tutorial for roles: https://medium.com/@ezp127/laravel-5-4-native-user-authentication-role-authorization-3dbae4049c8a . If I use public $with = ['roles']; on my User model it returns the entire role object within the user object and I need it to just return role:'role_name';

 /**
 * set up eloquent between roles/user
 *
 * @return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\belongsToMany
 */
public function roles() 
{
    return $this->belongsToMany(Role::class);
}

Above is in my User model and below is in my Role model to define the relationships.

 /**
 * provides a many-to-many relationship to User model
 *
 * @return User::class
 */
public function users()
{
  return $this->belongsToMany(User::class);
}

I thought that by adding this to the User model:

protected $appends = ['role_name'];

public function getRoleNameAttribute()
{
    return $this->attribute['name'];
}

it would return everything but all it does is create a role_name: 'user_name'; On the model. So I guess I realize I'm accessing just the Users table and not the Roles table in the DB, but again not really sure what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Solution

If for the purpose of convenience you need to access the role name directly from the model you should refer to the actual relationship data:

protected $appends = ['role_name'];

public function getRoleNameAttribute()
{
    return $this->roles->pluck('name');
}

This should append the array of role names to your user model. It will be an array because roles seem to have a many-to-many relationship with the User model.