Hi.

I am a little confused sometimes when using the relations in Eloquent. Can you help me?

I have in my User.php model

public function organisation() {
    return $this->belongsTo('Organisation');
}

And in my users table I have an organisation_id integer field set up as a foreign key.

When I am trying to access the organisation, I would think these two ways of writing would give the same result:

// Return the id of the users organisation
$id = Auth::user()->organisation->id

and

// Return the id of the users organisation
$id = Auth::user()->organisation()->id

However, only the first one works. In the first example Auth::user()->organisation returns an Organisation object, which is what I would expect, but Auth::user()->organisation() returns an Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsTo object which I can't use.

I find this very confusing. Can you help me understand it? Is this the way it's supposed to be?

Regards, Skovmand.