Custom Model Methods

I suspect that a lot of what you're interested in doing can be accomplished through eloquent's support for relationships. For example, you could describe a user's favorite companies using a many-to-many relationship, like so:

class User
{
    public function favoriteCompanies()
    {
        //"Company" is the eloquent model you're linking to
        //"user_company_favorites" is the pivot table with columns for the user_id and a company_id
        return $this->belongsToMany('Company', 'user_company_favorites');
    }

}

class Company
{
    public function favoriteOf()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'user_company_favorites');
    }
}

Now, assuming you have this in your "user_company_favorites" table:

id | user_id | company_id
1  | 7       | 4
2  | 7       | 12
3  | 4       | 4
4  | 5       | 16
5  | 4       | 16

$someUser = User::find(7);
$someUser->favoriteCompanies; //collection containing companies with the IDs 4 and 12

$someCompany = Company::find(16);
$someCompany->favoriteOf //collection containing users with the IDs 4 and 5

More on relationships: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#relationships

You can also use a super-handy feature called query scopes to do similar things. For example:

class Company
{
    function scopeInCounty($query, $countryCode)
    {
        $query->where('country_code', $countryCode);
    }
}

Now, you can use that function in your queries:

$activeCompaniesInUs = Company::where('status', 1)->inCountry('US')->get();

The above code is identical to:

$activeCompaniesInUs = Company::where('status', 1)->where('country_code', 'US')->get();

More on query scopes: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#query-scopes

Those two features should alleviate 99% of your need to use the DB facade inside your model class. But if not, there's no reason why you can'd do that as well.

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