Inverse of hasManyThrough Laravel

Currently, I'm developing a Learning Management System called Kelas Design. And today my task is to count how many Episodes do the Series have and vice-versa.

So I do the logic using Laravel Built-in Eloquent : Has Many Though. What's my logic look like is :

So I will get the Episodes data through Section. That's fine. But how about getting the Episode and which Series it's belongs to?

I realized that, in Laravel documentation, there's no instruction about Inverse of Has Many Through or Has One Through.

And since they don't provide that instruction, so I do need to create it manually. Usually if I faced a situation like this, I always reverse engineer the logic.

For example, Laravel has the built-in function such as Has Many Through & Has One Through.

So what I do is in Episode Model, I create method and returning Has One Through. If you're thinking about using belongsTo, you are wrong.

And this is my logic :

By default, you can just passed two (2) arguements if you are following Laravel convention. But in my case, If you just passed the two arguements, it will print an Error. Which the system cannot find the column you wanted.

With the extra arguements, you can search more depth. The third arguement is called $first_key and the fourth is $second_key.

Adding this, will allow the system to search more deep in your Database. And Eventually, will return you a data that you need. The third and fourth arguements is not nessasary an 'id'. It can be something else.

That's all, I hope my solution also can solve your situation like me also. If you have a better approach to do the inverse, please do comment below :)

PS : I've stumble upon one package name staudenmeir/belongs-to-through. Tested it and based on what I read at the files, this package also will solve my problem. However, I do not seek something overkill like this. Look at my solution, compared to this package. Even though the syntax is much cleaner, but I still need to download the package that have many files. And that I do not want to.

By the time I wrote this blog, this package has issue. Please refer to Github Issue