Join operations in Laravel - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Join Operations in Laravel Eloquent

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Laravel application to display a list of orders along with the customer names who placed them. The data is stored in two tables: customers and orders. You want to join these tables using Laravel's Eloquent ORM to fetch the combined data.

🎯 Goal: Build a Laravel Eloquent query that joins the orders table with the customers table on the customer_id field, and retrieves the order ID and the customer's name.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an Eloquent model variable for the orders table

Define a variable for the join condition column name

Write an Eloquent query using join to combine orders and customers

Select the orders.id and customers.name fields in the query

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Joining tables is common in web apps to combine related data, like showing orders with customer names.

💼 Career

Understanding Eloquent joins is essential for backend Laravel developers to write efficient database queries.

1

Set up the Orders model variable

Create a variable called $orders and assign it to the Eloquent model Order::query() to start building the query.

Laravel

$orders = Order::query();
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Order::query() to get a new query builder instance for the orders table.

2

Define the join column variable

Create a variable called $joinColumn and set it to the string 'customer_id', which will be used as the join key between orders and customers.

Laravel

$orders = Order::query();
$joinColumn = 'customer_id';
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact string 'customer_id' to the variable $joinColumn.

3

Write the join query

Use the join method on $orders to join the customers table where orders.customer_id equals customers.id. Store the result back in $orders.

Laravel

$orders = Order::query();
$joinColumn = 'customer_id';
$orders = $orders->join('customers', 'orders.' . $joinColumn, '=', 'customers.id');
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use join('customers', 'orders.' . $joinColumn, '=', 'customers.id') to join the tables.

4

Select the desired columns

Add a select method to $orders to retrieve only orders.id and customers.name. Store the final query back in $orders.

Laravel

$orders = Order::query();
$joinColumn = 'customer_id';
$orders = $orders->join('customers', 'orders.' . $joinColumn, '=', 'customers.id');
$orders = $orders->select('orders.id', 'customers.name');
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use select('orders.id', 'customers.name') to specify the columns to retrieve.