Getting count from pivot table in laravel eloquent

Question

I have a many to many relationship for orders and products.

Answer 1

Mind that Eloquent uses Query\Builder under the hood, so there is no such thing in Laravel, like 'query eloquent without using query builder'.

And this is what you need:

// additional helper relation for the count
public function ordersCount()
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('Order')
        ->selectRaw('count(orders.id) as aggregate')
        ->groupBy('pivot_product_id');
}

// accessor for easier fetching the count
public function getOrdersCountAttribute()
{
    if ( ! array_key_exists('ordersCount', $this->relations)) $this->load('ordersCount');

    $related = $this->getRelation('ordersCount')->first();

    return ($related) ? $related->aggregate : 0;
}

This will let you take advantage of eager loading:

$products = Product::with('ordersCount')->get();

// then for each product you can call it like this
$products->first()->ordersCount; // thanks to the accessor

Read more about Eloquent accessors & mutators,

and about dynamic properties, of which behaviour the above accessor mimics.

---

Of course you could use simple joins to get exactly the same query like in you example.