Excluding Table Names from Laravel's Many-to-Many Relations

This article was originally published on bmf-tech.com.

When designing many-to-many relationships, I thought I was following the documentation, but I had a slight misunderstanding.

Here are three tables, right?

The tables in this case:

• events
• event_tags
• event_tag_event ← pivot table

For normal tables:

• events
• tags
• tag_event

You would typically set up the relationship according to the default conventions, but when using slightly unconventional names, there are some things to be cautious about.

Let's take a look at the documentation

Laravel 5.1 Eloquent: Relationships

Ah, so I just need to provide a second argument!

public function eventTags()
{
  // The second argument is the Pivot table!
  return $this->belongstoMany('App\Modles\EventTag', 'event_tag_event')->withTimestamps();
}

public function events()
{
  return $this->belongsToMany('App\Models\Events');
}

When I launched tinker to check...

SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1066 Not unique table/alias on relationship

I got an error. ヽ(´ー｀)ノ

The second argument is the Pivot table name!

Could it be that I need to specify the Pivot table name?

SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1066 Not unique table/alias on relationship

public function eventTags()
{
  // The second argument is the Pivot table!
  return $this->belongstoMany('App\Modles\EventTag', 'event_tag_event')->withTimestamps();
}

public function events()
{
  return $this->belongsToMany('App\Models\Events');
}

I didn't get an error this time. ヽ(´ー｀)ノ

Thoughts

Recently, I've been more interested in the front end than the back end, and I can't sleep at night. ヽ(´ー｀)ノ