Hey Ross,

Can you give an example of the business case that would require such a complex set up for your ACLs? From the sounds of it, a user has as many roles as groups they belong to but the role is determined by the Group the user is acting on behalf of? Honestly, that sounds like a nightmare to me.

Maybe you're over thinking it?

In each group there are different roles: leader, participants, newcomers and so on. A user can join multiple groups. In each group he joins he can have a different role - in one group he can be the leader, in another - participant and so on.

In pure sql I'll just create table users_groups_roles with foreign keys to the main tables, but I can't figure out how to do it with Eloquent.

Hey Ross,

There are a couple options available to you.

The simplest would be to add an additional column to your users_groups pivot table. You would do that like

// User.php

public function groups()
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('Group')->withPivot('role');
}

You would access the data with something like this

$role = $user->groups->first()->pivot('role');

You can read more here (look for 'Retrieving Intermediate Table Columns')

Another option would be to say that a User has many Roles. Essentially, you'd be doing the same thing in your database, your user_groups table would instead be called roles and each record in the table would have it's own id. The table definition would look something like this:

create table roles (
  id int not null auto_increment primary key,
  user_id int not null,
  group_id int not null,
  role varchar(255) not null,
  foreign key fkey_users_user_id (user_id) references users (id),
  foriegn key fkey_groups_group_id (group_id) references groups (id),
  foreign key fkey_roles_role (role) references roles (name)
);

Then the User class would have these relationships:

public function groups()
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('Group', 'roles');
}

public function roles()
{
    return $this->hasMany('Role');
}

You could grab the user, group and role with a query like:

$forGroup = function ($query) use ($groupId)  {
    $query->where('group_id', $groupId);
};

$user = User::with(['groups' => $forGroup, 'roles' => $forGroup])->find($userId);

Hope it helps.

Yes, that should do the tick :) Thanks!