Indexing & Searching Relationships

[chris-mackie]

I am trying to include categories in my search but not getting any results.

I'm searching the main table "Posts" where there is a hasMany relationship to "Categories" and this has a hasOne relationship to "CategoryList" which has the column "name". This name column is the one that I want to include in the index when updating Posts so posts are searchable via the category name.

Is this possible?

[wlius-support3]

I think the best workaround is to create a MySQL View.
Brent from Spatie has a good article on it.

You can then reference the "MySQL View" model (which is still a regular eloquent model, it just points to a view instead of a table), and now you can search across relationships because the view can be built to join the relationships.

[sawtell]

Thanks @wlius-support3 for the idea to use a View.

This may help others:
I needed to perform the search on the "main" model (and return it as the result) but obviously use the View model for the actual search query.

I overrode the search() method on the main model so that the query is performed on the search View.

MainModel.php

public static function search($query = '', $callback = null) {
    return app(Builder::class, [
        'model' => new MainModelSeachView(), // Just this changed from the parent implementation.
        'query' => $query,
        'callback' => $callback,
        'softDelete'=> static::usesSoftDelete() && config('scout.soft_delete', false),
    ]);
}

Then in the View model I overrode newFromBuilder() in order to return the result as the main model.

MainModelSearchView.php

public function newFromBuilder($attributes = [], $connection = NULL) {
    return MainModel::find($attributes->id); // Ensure the ID is available in the View table
}

This way I can perform a search like MainModel::search('query') but the View is queried and I still get the result as a collection of MainModels.

Would love to know if there's a better way to do this.