Eager Loading Relationships

DataTables support searching and sorting of eager loaded relationships when using Eloquent. In this example, I will show you how to setup a eager loading search using EloquentEngine.

To enable search, we need to eager load the relationship we intend to use using Laravel's User::with('posts') api.

use DataTables;
 
Route::get('user-data', function() {
    $model = App\User::with('posts');
 
    return DataTables::eloquent($model)
                ->addColumn('posts', function (User $user) {
                    return $user->posts->map(function($post) {
                        return str_limit($post->title, 30, '...');
                    })->implode('<br>');
                })
                ->toJson();
});

To trigger search on posts relationship, we need to specify the relation.column_name as the name attribute in our javascript appropriately.

<script>
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('#users-table').DataTable({
            processing: true,
            serverSide: true,
            ajax: '{{ url("collection/basic-object-data") }}',
            columns: [
                {data: 'id', name: 'id'},
                {data: 'name', name: 'name'},
                {data: 'email', name: 'email'},
                {data: 'posts', name: 'posts.title'},
                {data: 'created_at', name: 'created_at'},
                {data: 'updated_at', name: 'updated_at'}
            ]
        });
    });
</script>

Looking at {data: 'posts', name: 'posts.title'},:

data: posts represents the data key (data.posts) that we are going to display on our table.
name: posts.title represents the User model relationship (posts) and the column we are going to perform our search (title).

It is advised that you include select('table.') on query to avoid weird issues where id from related model replaces the id of the main model.

$posts = Post::with('user')->select('posts.*');

Nested Relationships

Same strategy goes for nested relationships but do NOTE that ordering is not yet fully tested on nested relationships.

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