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Eloquent Relationships 352
We are going to build a system using Artists, Albums and Listeners. Listeners are simply users that
like to listen to a variety of albums. Let’s think about the relationships.
• An Artist has_many Albums.
• An Album belongs_to an Artist.
• A Listener belongs_to_many Albums.
• An Album belongs_to_many Listeners.
We have a simple relationship between an Artist and many Albums, and a many to many
relationship between Listeners and Albums. So let’s think about our table structure. If an Album
belongs_to an Artist then the identifying foreign key for the relationship will exist on the Album
table. The many to many relationship will require a pivot table.
We know that Eloquent required a plural form of the model for its table name (unless we specify
otherwise), but how do we name the pivot table? The default format for the pivot table is the singular
form of the two related models separated by an _ underscore. The order of the instances should be
alphabetical. This means that our pivot table is called album_listener.
All foreign key columns follow a similar naming convention. The singular form of the related model
appended with _id. Our pivot table will contain both album_id and listener_id.
Let’s look at the constructed migration, then we will examine anything that’s new in more detail.
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