Laravel: JSON and pivot table

Question

Sorry about the non-explanatory title but I could not come up with a descriptive one.

I've got the following 3 tables: - games - platforms - games_platforms

And I've got 2 Models in Laravel for both Platform and Game.

public function games() 
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('App\Game', 'games_platforms')->withPivot('release_date');
}

public function platforms() 
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('App\Platform', 'games_platforms')->withPivot('release_date');
}

Now this works like a charm, I get a JSON string with all the information in the 3 tables, like this.

[{
    "id": 1,
    "name": "Borderlands",
    "short_description": "",
    "created_at": null,
    "updated_at": null,
    "platforms": [{
        "id": 4,
        "name": "PC",
        "pivot": {
            "game_id": 1,
            "platform_id": 4,
            "release_date": "2016-03-03"
        }
    }]
}]

Now my problem is as follows. I don't want to show the whole 'pivot' information, just the 'release_date', like this:

"platforms": [{
        "id": 4,
        "name": "PC",
        "release_date": "2016-03-03"

Is there an easy way in Laravel to do such a thing? As far as I can see right now, looking at other posts, is to either write a function that turns the json into an array and I can arrange it then. Or I can write my own query instead of letting Laravel do all that.

Hope you guys can help me with this issue. Thanks!

Answer 1

I would modify the data returned from the query via methods on the collection class:

//replace Game::all() with your actual query
return Game::all()->each(function($game){
    $game->platforms->map(function($platform){
        $platform->release_date = $platform->pivot->release_date;
        unset($platform->pivot);
        return $platform;
    });
});