Hi guys,

I'm fairly new to Laravel, I'm designing an application which will have an API which returns database results in JSON format. For this example I'm using 4 tables :

• Items of type 1
• items of type 2
• Comments
• Users

So, every item has a user and a thread of comments. What I'm trying to achieve is something like the following:

"post" :
{
  item id
  item pic
  user:
  {
    user id
    user pic
  }
  comments
  [
   {
    comment_id,
    comment_text,
   },
   {
    comment_id,
    comment_text,
   }
  ]
}

so to retrieve the type 1 and 2 items, i'm doing this :

	$items1 = DB::table('items1')->select('id','user_id','name','pic','created_at');
	$items2 = DB::table('items2')->select('id','user_id','name','pic','created_at');

then I join them :

    $combined = $items1->union($items2)->orderBy('created_at','desc')->get();

My question is, what is the most efficient way to get the user info and comments info for each item? It could be a long list so I want to be sure that I use the framework resources properly instead of put my own SQL code here and there.

Thank you in advance for your help.