Laravel 4 rest api non-implicit action routing and left join - rest

Question

I am pretty new to Laravel but I certainly like Laravel 4. I am stuck at two points -
The first is that - I have a non crud action method in a controller that has to do a left join with two tables and return the result. There are two tables, Employees and Departments. I am trying to get all assigned and non-assigned employees for creating an association between them. This action method is inside "EmployeeController". It is named as "allAssignedEmployees". I tried the following routing but seems it doesn't work :
Route::resource('employees/assignedEmployees/{deptId}', 'EmployeesController#assignedEmployees');
Secondly, I am not kind of too sure about my left join. The following is what I made out of googling
$unassignedEmployees = DB::table('employee')
->join('department', function($join)
{
$join->on('department.employee_id', '=', 'employee.id');
})
->where('department.id', '=', $deptId)
->get();
Apparently what I wanted in SQL is - select * from employee emp left join department dept on dept.employee_id = employee.id and employee.dept_id = 2
The other related questions unanswered I had in mind are - how to log in Laravel 4? Especially SQL queries or general log statements. Is there an inbuilt logging support.
I know its a lot of questions, but I am sure the answers will help my learning process hence thanks for your time.

Answer 1

First I'm not being rude but you should have studied Documentation First at least.
Now coming to your questions:
About Resource Controller:
Route::resource('employees', 'EmployeesController');
This single route declaration creates multiple routes to handle a variety of RESTful actions on the employees resource. Likewise, the generated controller will already have stubbed methods for each of these actions with notes informing you which URIs and verbs they handle.
Actions Handled By Resource Controller
Verb Path Action Route Name
GET /employees index employees.index
GET /employees/create create employees.create
POST /employees store employees.store
GET /employees/{id} show employees.show
GET /employees/{id}/edit edit employees.edit
PUT/PATCH /employees/{id} update employees.update
DELETE /employees/{id} destroy employees.destroy
So if you have created resource controller then get routes like employees/{id} will be handled by controllers show method.
But if you want specific method to handle then you have to route it like this
Route::get('employees/assignedEmployees/{deptId}',''EmployeesController#assignedEmployees'');
And regarding logging read here