Laravel attach pivot to table with multiple values
Stefan Izdrail
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
Title: Efficiently Attaching Pivots with Multiple Values in Laravel
Introduction
When building applications that involve many-to-many relationships, it is essential to effectively manage the relations between different entities. In Laravel, managing these relationships is made easy through its Eloquent ORM. However, you may encounter a situation where you need to attach multiple values in a pivot table at once. This blog post will explore how we can achieve this using Laravel's Eloquent models and methods.The Problem
Consider the given scenario with food allergies and their severities. We have a link table connecting foods to allergies along with their corresponding severity values. This table has the following format:food_id|allergy_id|severity
-------|----------|--------
1 | 1 | 3
1 | 4 | 1
2 | 2 | 1
$food->allergies()->attach($allergy_ids);
The Solution
A simple way to address this issue is by creating an array of related values (allergy IDs and severity values) and then iterating through it to attach them in a loop. Here's how you can do it: 1. Create two arrays, one for allergy IDs and another for the corresponding severities. 2. Loop through each array item and attach the respective allergy_id and severity value. You don't need to iterate over both arrays together because Laravel will automatically pair them. 3. Attach the updated relationships using the `$food` object's `attach()` method and passing in the created arrays of IDs and severities. Note that you may also provide a third parameter for attaching related models with custom key-value pairs. Here is an example code snippet showing how this can be done:$allergy_ids = [1, 2, 3];
$severity_ids = [4, 5, 6];
foreach ($allergy_ids as $allergy_id) {
foreach ($severity_ids as $severity_value) {
$food->allergies()->attach($allergy_id, ['severity' => $severity_value]);
}
}