How to implement many-to-many relationships in LARvel 4 RESTful API

Question

I would like to implement something similar to what was asked in this question in Laravel 4, where the player/ resource can have more than one team/ , and vice versa.

In an ideal world, I could request

players/1/teams

and return some JSON as follows:

 { player: { id: 1, name: 'Bob', sport: 'Curling', teams: [ { id: 1, name: 'Northern Curling Soc.', age: 2}, { id:2, name: 'Southern Curling Soc.', age: 4 } ] } 

or

teams/{id}/players and get correlative.

Obviously, if I used Laravel views, I could just call $player->teams and everything will be fine, but this is for the JSON API, so everything should be in front.

I also need to be able to break down related results, although this is probably another question.

How can I do this with Laravel?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Laravel 4 added support for nested resource routes. They are quite pleasant and seem quite suitable for you.

Basically, besides your “direct” resource controllers, you need to add routes for your nested resources. In this case, in addition to:

 Route::resource('players', 'PlayersController'); // players/# Route::resource('teams', 'TeamsController'); // teams/# 

... you will need:

 Route::resource('players.teams', 'PlayerTeamsController'); // players/#/teams/# Route::resource('teams.players', 'TeamPlayersController'); // teams/#/player/# 

Then, in your controllers, methods that usually receive one ID as a parameter will now receive two (the order is determined by your route):

 class PlayerTeamsController extends Controller { public function show($player_id, $team_id) { } } 

You can then use inheritance to avoid code redundancy between your controllers.

Answer 2

Through the API, just enable the link and return the object (in laravel 4). L4 will automatically format the data for JSON output.

 return Player::with( [ 'teams' ] )->get(); 

This will give you pretty much exactly the format you need :)