Join in Laravel's Eloquent - database

Question

I have a visit Model and I'm getting the data I want like that:
$app_visits = Visit::select([
'start',
'end',
'machine_name'
])->where('user_id', $chosen_id)->get();
But I want to add points for every visit. Every visit has an interaction (but there's no visit_id (because of other system I cannot add it).
Last developer left it like that:
$interactions = Interaction::where([
'machine_name' => $app_visit->machine_name,
])->whereBetween('date', [$app_visit->start, $app_visit->end])->get();
$points = 0;
foreach ($interactions as $interaction) {
$points += (int)$interaction->app_stage;
}
$app_visits[$key]['points'] = $points
But I really don't like it as it's slow and messy. I wanted to just add 'points' sum to the first query, to touch database only once.
#edit as someone asked for database structure:
visit:
|id | start | end | machine_name | user_id
inteaction:
|id | time | machine_name | points

Answer 1

You can use a few things in eloquent. Probably the most useful for this case, is the select(DB::raw(sql...)) as you will have to add a bit of raw sql to retrieve a count.
For example:
return $query
->join(...)
->where(...)
->select(DB::raw(
COUNT(DISTINCT res.id) AS count'
))
->groupBy(...);
Failing that, I'd just replace the eloquent with raw sql. We've had to do that a fair bit, as our data sets are massive, and eloquent model building has proven a little slow.
Update as you've added structure. Why not just add a relation to Interaction, based upon machine_name (or even a custom method using raw sql that calculates the points), and use: Visits::with('interaction.visitPoints')->...blah ?

Answer 2

Take a look at DB instead of Eloquent:
https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/queries
For more complex and efficient queries.
There is also a possibility to use raw SQL with this facade.