John Davidson

Message:

I feel this should be pretty straight forward, but I can't seem to find the answers online...

I'm working on a Laravel 9 API project and I have the below relationships:

1. Projects have many Groups


2. Groups have a many to many relationship with Users using a pivot table called GroupUser

What I'm trying to do is get the count of all Users associated with a specific Project through each group, but I just want them in one combined list. For example:

A Project has 2 Groups, each of which have 3 Users, so the output would be a 6 Users, and I don't care about the same user being included in both groups and counted twice.

I've tried using the below in the Project model:

public function users()

{

     return $this->hasManyThrough(User::class, Group::class)

}

But this seems to only work if the Group -> User relationship is a hasMany, but its a belongsToMany because of the pivot table.

Ideally I want to be able to access the count in a resource like this:

$project->users()->count()

Any ideas how I would go about getting this to work?

Thanks in advance!

---

My Answer:
You can achieve this by using the `hasManyThrough` relationship with a custom pivot table. Here's how you can set it up:

In your Project model, define the `users` relationship like this:

php
public function users()
{
return $this->hasManyThrough(User::class, GroupUser::class, 'project_id', 'id', 'id', 'group_id');
}


In this relationship definition:
- `User::class` is the related model you want to retrieve
- `GroupUser::class` is the custom pivot table
- `'project_id'` is the foreign key on the pivot table that references the Project model
- `'id'` is the local key on the Project model
- `'id'` is the local key on the User model
- `'group_id'` is the foreign key on the pivot table that references the Group model

With this relationship in place, you can now access the count of all users associated with a specific project through each group like this:

php
$project->users()->count();


This will give you the total count of users associated with the project through all groups.