Hiding Join Entity

Coming soon...

Act 1: The Homepage Bites the Dust

Alright, so you've been cruising around and you suddenly notice that your homepage is in shambles. The culprit? Our homepage template, ship.droidnames. Now, if you've been following along, you know that calling ship.droidnames is actually our secret code for Starship->getDroidNames(). But oh, the horror! It's broken. Why? Because it's still pining for the long-gone droids property.

Act 2: The Plot Thickens

Now, we could patch this up by running a merry little loop over $this->StarshipDroids, grabbing each StarshipDroid, and then pickpocketing the name off of each one. But wait, let's hit the brakes. This is turning into a programmer's spaghetti. It's like trying to navigate the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field.

I don't know about you, but I still want to be able to summon Starship->getDroids(). Because, let's face it, at 30,000 feet, it's still a love story between Starship and Droid. The fact that we have this third wheel, StarshipDroid, sneaking around is just a nitty-gritty detail most of the time we'd rather sweep under the rug.

So, my goal, should I choose to accept it (and I do), is to be able to call Starship->getDroids() and have it return a collection of Droid objects. Can it be done, you ask? Absolutely, my friend, absolutely.

Act 3: The Gift of Map()

Enter $this->StarshipDroids, which we'll run through the magical map() function. We're going to convert each StarshipDroid — let's christen it StarshipDroid, a much better name. We'll call StarshipDroid->getDroids(). This is going to metamorphose this from a collection of StarshipDroid objects into a collection of Droid objects.

Now, we've got this method down here in getDroidNames. Instead of mourning the droids property, let's switch to the getDroids() method, which should now be up and running.

Act 4: The Homepage Strikes Back

Alright, now brace yourself and head over to the homepage. And voila! Things are back to normal. Fetching the droids for a ship is as easy as pie. And guess what? We made this change and the rest of our code didn't even bat an eye.

Act 5: Future-Proofing Droids

Let's take a stroll to Droid and locate getStarships(). We haven't used this method yet but let's tweak it here to make it ready for anything the future might throw at us.

Just like we did in Starship, we're going to transform this collection of StarshipDroid objects into a collection of Droid objects. So, navigating this relationship is back to being a cakewalk. And the best part? This change is like a stealth bomber — completely invisible to the rest of our code.

Epilogue: The Last Hurdle

There's one last thing we need to deal with. When we create the relationship, we still need to do a bit of heavy lifting by creating this join entity. It's not as simple as whispering $ship->addDroid($droid). But worry not, we're going to tackle that in the next chapter. Stay tuned!