Laravel 5 hasMany relationship on two columns
Stefan Bogdanescu
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
Title: Exploring Laravel hasMany Relationships with Two Columns
Laravel is a popular PHP framework that allows developers to create complex relationships between models through Eloquent ORM. One common scenario involves using two columns in a table to establish a relationship between records, such as when working with user information and their connections. In this blog post, we will discuss how to implement a hasMany relationship on these two columns.
Let's assume that you have a 'user_relations' table containing two columns: 'user_id' and 'related_user_id'. The goal is to define a relationship in your model where a user can be related to another user through either column, i.e., the user having their primary ID or being the secondary ID for that particular relation.
First, let us set up our models:
```php
class User extends Model
{
public function userRelations()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\UserRelation');
}
}
```
In the above code, we have defined a relationship called 'userRelations' within our 'User' model. This will allow us to retrieve all related 'UserRelation' records for each user.
Now, let's define the 'UserRelation' model:
```php
class UserRelation extends Model
{
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\User');
}
}
```
Here, we have defined a one-to-many relationship between 'UserRelation' and 'User'. This enables us to find the related 'User' for each 'UserRelation' model.
Now that our models are set up, let's define the query to retrieve the necessary records. Since we want all user relations where either the primary or secondary ID is involved, our query will combine both cases using a logical OR operator:
```php
$cause = Cause::with('donations.user.userRelations')
->where('active', '=', 1)
->first();
```
In this example, we are using eager loading to load the donation records for a cause, and each donation record will include the related user information along with their related 'UserRelation'. We also apply a filter to get only active causes.
So, what if you need to retrieve these relations without pagination? You can use Eloquent's 'withCount()' function, like this:
```php
$user = User::withCount('userRelations')
->where('id', $userId) // Replace with the actual user_id
->first();
```
This query will return the user along with their total number of 'UserRelation' records.
To summarize, establishing a Laravel hasMany relationship with two columns can involve some unique challenges but is achievable using the correct combination of Eloquent model relationships and queries. By following the above approach and best practices, you can easily manage these complex scenarios in your application.