how to eager load in a Many to Many relationship in laravel 5?

Question

My user table and item table are related by a many to many relationship, the item table has some data in foreign tables, example color table I have a pivot table that relates the two. My question is, if I want to retrieve all the items associated to a user with a color how do I get them with eager loading?

I know that $user->item will retrieve all the items for that user.

But if I want to eager load all the items for that user with the color attributes in one query, how do I do it? At the moment I am looping through the items associated to the user and lazy loading every data I need, for example

foreach($user->item as $i){

      echo($i->item->color)

}

This means every cycle makes a new query...

here the models:

User model:

public function item(){
        return $this->belongsToMany('App\item')->withTimestamps();
    }

item model:

public function user(){
        return $this->belongsToMany('App\User');
    }

and this the schema for the pivot table

Schema::create('item_user', function(Blueprint $table) {

            $table->unsignedInteger('user_id')->unsigned()->index();
            $table->foreign('user_id')
                ->references('id')
                ->on('users')
                ->onDelete('cascade');

            $table->unsignedInteger('item_id')->unsigned()->index();
            $table->foreign('item_id')
                ->references('id')
                ->on('items')
                ->onDelete('cascade');

            $table->timestamps();
        });

Answer 1

You can simply use a Nested Eager Loading

Eager loading is done using with(): in your instance you could use the following:

public function item(){
    return $this->belongsToMany('App\item')->withTimestamps()->with('color');
}

This will eager load the color on the "item". However you can also eager load immediately on the User model in your controller:

User::with('items.color')->find(1);

I'm not sure based on your code that the relations/model is like this, but you get the point I guess.