👀 Views: 162 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-06

laravel eloquent relationships PHP

I've tried everything I can think of but I just started working with I'm experiencing unexpected results when trying to fetch related records using Eloquent in Laravel 9... I have a `Post` model that has many `Comment` models, and each `Comment` can optionally belong to a `User`. Here’s the code I'm using to retrieve a post along with its comments and the corresponding users: ```php $post = Post::with(['comments.user'])->find($postId); ``` However, I'm getting `null` for the `user` relationship on some comments even when I know that the user ID exists in the `users` table. The SQL query that gets executed is: ``` select * from `posts` where `id` = ? limit 1; select * from `comments` where `post_id` = ?; select * from `users` where `id` in (?, ?, ?); ``` The question seems to be with the eager loading setup. I’ve double-checked my relationships in the models: ```php class Post extends Model { public function comments() { return $this->hasMany(Comment::class); } } class Comment extends Model { public function user() { return $this->belongsTo(User::class); } } class User extends Model { // User model code } ``` I’ve also verified that the `user_id` in the `comments` table is correctly populated. Still, some comments return `null` for the user relation. I suspect it might be due to missing entries in the `users` table for some `user_id` values, but I need a way to confirm this without running multiple queries manually. What could be causing this scenario, and how can I debug it to find out why those user records are not being fetched? Any insights on best practices for handling nested relationships in Laravel would also be appreciated. Thanks for any help you can provide! My development environment is Ubuntu 20.04. Has anyone else encountered this? The project is a service built with Php. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.