retrieve full data from foreign table with eloquent - eloquent

Question

I've been reading some answers to similar questions here on the site, it seems everyone is trying to use a low level approach. The question is, shouldn't laravel and eloquent make it easy to solve stuff like that?
If I have a table with ids to two foreign tables, exmple item_id foreign of table items and item_type_id foreign of table item_types. How can I retrieve and join the data from these two tables directly instead of manually specifiying the id to look at in those foreign table and stuff?
Shouldn't eloquent have something like "get data from foreign table given the ids that you found in pivot table and spit out the joined data" ?

Answer 1

Laravel Eloquent: Relationships
I believe you should refer eloquent relationships. It would help you to fetch datas from related datatables.
For Ex: We can have 2 to 3 three table Users, Groups & user_group(pivot table)
The user_group would have the relation between each user and various groups.
In User Model
class User extends Eloquent
{
public function groups()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('Group', 'user_group', 'user_id', 'group_id');
}
}
In Group Model
class Group extends Eloquent
{
public function users()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('Group', 'user_group', 'group_id', 'user_id');
}
}
Now you can fetch a user and his relation with groups likewise:
$user_groups = User::find($user_id)->groups;
And to fetch the members of a group likewise:
$group_members = Group::find($group_id)->users;
This code basically does the join in the backend.
Refer docs for deeper understanding.
Hope this would get you started.