Laravel 8 Many to Many relationship not working (no errors being thrown)

Question

I am new to Laravel but am having a very odd issue.

I successfully created models and migrations for 6 tables to work with many-to-many relationships. One of the relationships works fine and I can retrieve data through a route. The other, however, only returns a white screen (no error, no nothing). The networking tab response says: "This request has no response data available" - but I've triple checked the database and search for different records and it never returns any results.

I've kept the information as simple as possible and followed all naming conventions.

Any idea what is going on here? Is something configured wrong? Please help me from going crazy - I've tried a ton of code iterations and nothing seems to work to establish the many to many client/network relationship.

Not Working Relationship

Client table:

+----------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field          | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+----------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id             | bigint unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| client_name    | varchar(255)    | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| client_type_id | bigint unsigned | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| address        | varchar(255)    | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| address_2      | varchar(255)    | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| city           | varchar(255)    | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| state          | varchar(255)    | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| zip_code       | varchar(255)    | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| country        | varchar(255)    | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| created_at     | timestamp       | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| updated_at     | timestamp       | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+----------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Network table:

+--------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field        | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+--------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id           | bigint unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| network_name | varchar(255)    | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| created_at   | timestamp       | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| updated_at   | timestamp       | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+--------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

client_network table:

+------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id         | bigint unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| client_id  | bigint unsigned | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| network_id | bigint unsigned | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| created_at | timestamp       | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| updated_at | timestamp       | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Client model:

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Client extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;

    public function networks()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Network::class);
    }
}

Network model:

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Network extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;

    public function clients()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Client::class);
    }
}

Route:

Route::get('/testclient', function() {
    $network = Client::find(1)->network_name;
    return $network;
});

Answer 1

To anyone dealing with a similar issue, the problem in this situation was not the relationship, it was the route extracting the data from the relationship.

Not Working Route

Route::get('/testclient', function() {
    $network = Client::find(1)->network_name;
    return $network;
});

Working Route

Route::get('/testing', function(){

    $networks = Client::find(1)->networks;

    foreach($networks as $network){

        $network_arr[] = $network->network_name;

    }

    return $network_arr;

To solve the issue, the suggested code in the comments helped to show that data was indeed being extracted from the relationship but not displaying properly.

Helper Code:

dd(Network::find(1)->clients);