👀 Views: 395 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11

laravel eloquent relationships PHP

I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm experiencing an issue with a `hasManyThrough` relationship in Laravel 9 that seems to be returning incorrect counts for related models. I have two models: `User` and `Post`, connected through a `Comment` model. When I try to get the number of comments each user has made on their posts, the count is not what I expect. Here is how I've defined the relationships in my models: In the `User` model, I have: ```php public function posts() { return $this->hasMany(Post::class); } public function comments() { return $this->hasManyThrough(Comment::class, Post::class); } ``` And in the `Post` model: ```php public function comments() { return $this->hasMany(Comment::class); } ``` When I run the following query to get users along with their comment counts, I use: ```php $users = User::withCount('comments')->get(); ``` However, the count seems off. For example, if a user has made 3 comments on 2 different posts, it ends up showing that they have 5 comments instead. I've also checked my `comments` table, and it looks like there are no duplicate entries that could be inflating the count. Additionally, I've tried using `distinct()` in my query like this: ```php $users = User::withCount(['comments' => function ($query) { $query->distinct(); }])->get(); ``` Yet, the counts are still incorrect. Is there something I might be missing in my relationship definitions or the way I'm querying these counts? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance! For reference, this is a production CLI tool.