3 years ago

Category: Laravel

When you are working with a one-to-many relationship, it is sometimes the case that a particular instance on the "many" side of the relationship is flagged as unique and important to your system in some way. It can be really handy to be able to access that unique instance in a first class way from your models.

Although this has solved the re-usability issue, some of the previous issues still linger and we have introduced some new issues: In an attempt to address some more of these existing issues we might look at introducing a dedicated method to wrap up the query and an accessor to retrieve the first() item of the returned collection.

This method is always going to return a collection - however looking at the HasOne::getResults method we can see that it is calling first() on the query for us (I've removed some of the code that we don't care about for the purpose of this post).

The example we have used focused on the premise that there is some kind of unique flag per user that indicates which payment method we want to retrieve.