Handling Complex Nested Relationships in Laravel 10 with Custom Accessors
I'm upgrading from an older version and I'm trying to debug I'm learning this framework and I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm working on a Laravel 10 application where I need to retrieve a user's posts along with a custom formatted date for each post. The challenge arises because the posts have a nested relationship with comments, and I want to include a count of comments in the response along with the formatted dates. However, I am encountering issues when trying to create custom accessors for the formatted date in the Post model. Here’s a simplified version of my Post model: ```php namespace App\Models; use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model; class Post extends Model { protected $fillable = ['title', 'content']; public function comments() { return $this->hasMany(Comment::class); } public function getFormattedCreatedAtAttribute() { return $this->created_at->format('F j, Y'); } } ``` And my User model looks like this: ```php namespace App\Models; use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model; use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany; class User extends Model { public function posts() { return $this->hasMany(Post::class); } } ``` When I try to retrieve the posts with the following code: ```php $user = User::with('posts.comments')->find($userId); return $user->posts; ``` I receive the posts without the formatted date, and I am not sure how to include the comment count in the response. I tried adding the comment count directly to the `Post` model like this: ```php public function getCommentCountAttribute() { return $this->comments()->count(); } ``` However, the `comment_count` is not appearing when I access the posts. The output of the API only shows the basic post details. I also ran a debug and it seems that the accessors are not triggered when accessing the collection directly. Am I missing something? Should I be using a different approach, like appending the attributes or modifying the query? Any advice on how to get a collection of posts with both formatted dates and comment counts would be greatly appreciated! My development environment is Linux. What am I doing wrong? I'm on Ubuntu 22.04 using the latest version of Php. Is there a better approach? This is for a microservice running on CentOS. The project is a mobile app built with Php.