Undefined property in Laravel 5

Question

I've looked at other questions that have answered this same error and I understand I have a property that cannot be defined but not sure how to make it defined. First time using Many-to-Many relationship so I'm assuming this is the issue.

Project Table id company stage status date_started date_finished timestamps

Employee Table id name department timestamps

Employee_Project Table id employee_id project_id

In both models, I have belongsToMany and for the show function in the ProjectController, I have:

$projects = Project::find($id);

In the view, I want to show company name ($projects->company) and the employees on that project with their respective departments. These do not work:

$projects->employees->name

$projects->employees->department

How do I access these properties?

--Update-- Jeff's answer works but I set up a table like <thead><th>PM</th><th>AM</th></thead>

<tbody><td>@if($employee->department == 'Project Manager'){{ $employee->name }}</td>

<td>@else($employee->department == 'Account Manager'){{ $employee->name }}</td></tbody>@endif

and this does not work to show the correct employees in their respective sections. Any ideas how to fix this?

Answer 1

Your problem is that $project->employees is a collection, not an individual instance of an employee. You will need to iterate over the collection in order to access each individual employee's name:

foreach($project->employees as $employee) {
    echo $employee->name;
    echo $employee->department;
}

Update

It looks like you may need to restructure as below, I think you probably want the entire if construct to be within the same table cell, though I could be wrong:

<tbody>
    @foreach($project->employees as $employee)
    <tr>
        <td>
        @if($employee->department == 'Project Manager')
            {{ $employee->name }}
        @elseif($employee->department == 'Account Manager')
            {{ $employee->department }}
        @else
            <!-- What about non project/account managers? -->
        @endif
        </td>
    </tr>
    @endforeach
</tbody>

I could be totally wrong, and maybe you want account managers and project managers in different columns:

<tr>
    <td>
    @if($employee->department == 'Project Manager')
        {{ $employee->name }}
    @endif
    </td>
    <td>
    @if($employee->department == 'Account Manager')
        {{ $employee->name }}
    @endif
    </td>
</tr>

Be sure to take a look at the documentation on Blade if statements.

Update 2

If you want to order how the related entities are coming back, you can do something like this (assuming you want the employees ordered by their department:

$project->employees()->orderBy('department', 'DESC')->get();

Notice you're no longer accessing the property, you're calling the relation method employees() so that you can modify the query prior to it being executed.

Here's a link to the documentation on ordering queries, and there is also another StackOverflow question on it.