WherePivot and WherePivotIn - additional filters for many-to-many relationships

Tutorial last revisioned on August 18, 2022 with Laravel 9
Recently I've found a small detail in Laravel documentation which I want to share with you. Apparently, it's possible to filter pivot tables additionally, if needed. Let me show you how. Imagine a simple situation: we have tables products, categories and a pivot table category_product with this relationship:
class Product extends Model
{

    public function category()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Category::class);
    }

}
And there are a few products entered - one with each different category: category_id = 1 and category_id = 2: screen-shot-2017-01-02-at-6-57-31-pm And we want to show product list in the table - here's how it looks (code and table generated by our QuickAdmin): products list As you can see, column Category lists all possible categories, code looks like this:

  @foreach ($product->category as $singleCategory)
     {{ $singleCategory->name }}
  @endforeach

And now, here's a magic trick: what if for some reason we want to show only categories with category_product.id = 1? There are additional methods for that: wherePivot() or wherePivotIn(). Then relationship looks like this:
    public function category()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Category::class)->wherePivot('id', 1);
    }
Or like this:
    public function category()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Category::class)->wherePivotIn('id', [1]);
    }
And then what happens in our table? It shows only Category 1, even if there are entries with Category 2: pivot table wherepivotin Of course, you can also filter entries bigger/smaller than X, with ->wherePivot('id', '>', 1) or something like that. As I said - small detail, but might be useful to avoid tons of code for filtering! More on many-to-many relationships - in official documentation.
avatar

Thanks man! Saved my life!

Like our articles?

Become a Premium Member for $129/year or $29/month
What else you will get:
  • 58 courses (1054 lessons, total 46 h 42 min)
  • 78 long-form tutorials (one new every week)
  • access to project repositories
  • access to private Discord

Recent Premium Tutorials