Building JSON object in desired way with Laravel - arrays

Question

Hi There Beste Collegues,
I've having an problem building my json output structure well.
What i want is the following output:
{
comments: {
data: {
created_at: "date",
other: "etc",
from: {
username: "navidos",
user_id: 1
}
}
}
}
But the way it is now build is:
{
data: {
description: "post description",
status: "public",
link: "http://www.bla.com",
created_at: "2015-01-23 00:00:00",
comments: [
{
text: "comment text 1",
date: "2015-01-23 18:30:00",
id: 1
},
{
text: "comment text 2",
date: "2015-01-23 18:35:00",
id: 2
},
{
text: "comment text 3",
date: "2015-01-23 19:00:00",
id: 3
}
],
user: {
user_id: 1,
username: "navid",
profile_picture: null,
bio: null
}
}
}
The output i get is almost fine but i want the comment section in this output like the first output. I've tried everything with array_merge and array push but can't figure out what i'm doing wrong here. Is there anyone who can help me out. I'm using Laravel 4 and doing my Relations with the Eloquent ORM.
So in my route i've now the following.
$post = Post::find($id);
$postComments = $post->comments;
$usersPost = $post->user;
return Response::json(
$data = array('data'=>$post)
);
I would be very grateful if someone can help me out with this. Tnx in advanced.

Answer 1

You could simply name your relationship to User in Comment from():
public function from(){
return $this->belongsTo('User');
}
Then eager load comments and from:
$post = Post::with('comments.from')->find($id);
This should result in something like this:
{
description: "post description",
status: "public",
link: "http://www.bla.com",
created_at: "2015-01-23 00:00:00",
comments: [
{
text: "comment text 1",
date: "2015-01-23 18:30:00",
id: 1,
from: {
user_id: 1,
username: "navid",
profile_picture: null,
bio: null
}
}
// next comment
]
}
If you want to hide some of these attributes in your JSON output you can add them to the $hidden array in the model:
class Comment extends Eloquent {
protected $hidden = ['id'];
}

Answer 2

What i currently have in my Post.php model is:
//An post belongs to an user
public function user(){
return $this->belongsTo('User')->select(array('user_id', 'username','profile_picture','bio'));
}
//An post has many comments
public function comments(){
return $this->hasMany('Comment')->select(array('comment as text','date','comment_id as id'));
}
and my Comment.php model looks like:
//An post belongs to an user
public function user(){
return $this->belongsTo('User')->select(array('user_id', 'username','profile_picture','bio'));
}
and my User.php model looks like:
public function from(){
return $this->hasMany('comments');
}
in my Route now i having the following like you suggest:
$post = Post::with('comments.from')->find($id);
but this throws an error:
Missing argument 1 for Illuminate\Database\Query\Builder::from()
is there something i'm not doing correct?