Is there a way to append a count of objects in a nested collection as an attribute in laravel?

Solution 1:

There are a few ways to do this, so I will provide one possible solution.

You can look into Laravel Accessors - https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/eloquent-mutators#defining-an-accessor

In your case, you could have functions on your Match model like so:

public function getGoalsTeamAAttribute() {
    // calculate and return goal count for team A
}

public function getGoalsTeamBAttribute() {
    // calculate and return goal count for team B
}

public function getResultAttribute() {
    // calculate and return result
}

You can then do one of two things to include this data on the collection.

1. Add $appends = ['result', 'goals_team_a', 'goals_team_b']; to the top of your Match model. This will append these values onto the collection when you cast it to an array or to JSON. Google 'laravel appends' for more info.

2. When you have a Match as an eloquent object, simply call $match->goals_team_a and it will do the calculation on the fly. You would want to be careful of n+1 problems with this approach, since it will run any database queries that are in your getGoalsTeamAAttribute function. You would want to make sure you're lazy loading (->with('goals')) before running $match->goals_team_a.