Call to undefined method (laravel 5.2)

Question

I want to display friends of the user. But I am getting the following error:

BadMethodCallException in Builder.php line 2345: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Database\Query\Builder::friends()

FriendController:

 <?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

use App\Http\Requests;

use App\User;

use Auth;

class FriendController extends Controller
{
   public function getIndex(){
    $friends=Auth::user()->friends();
    return view('friends',['friends'=>$friends]);
   }
}

Route:

Route::get('/friends',[
'uses' => 'FriendController@getIndex',
'as' => 'friends',
'middleware' => 'auth:web'
]);

User model:

public function getName(){
    if($this->firstname && $this->lastname){
        return "{$this->firstname} {$this->lastname}";
    }
    if($this->firstname)
        return $this->firstname;
    return null;
}

public function getNameOrUsername(){
    return $this->getName() ?: $this->username;
}

public function getFirstNameOrUsername() {
    return $this->firstname ?: $this->username;
}

My view:

<div  id="grp" class="panel-heading">
  <h3 id="grouptitle" class="panel-title">Your Friends</h3>
  @if(!$friends->count())
  <p>you have no friends</p>
  @else
  @foreach($friends as $user)
  @include('userblock')
  @endforeach
  @endif
</div>

userblock.blade:

<div class="media">
<a href="{{ route('myplace', ['username'=>$user->username]) }}" class="pull-left">
    <img src="" class="media-object" alt="{{ $user->getNameOrUsername() }}">
</a>
<div class="media-body">
    <h4 class="media-heading"><a href="#">{{ $user->getNameOrUsername() }}</a></h4>

</div>

Answer 1

Assuming friends are related users and you have a friend_id column in your user table, you could to add a friends method in your User model:

public function friends()
{
    return $this->hasMany(\App\User::class, 'friend_id');
}

You could read more about relationship here. You could also use a package for this need. Or search on SO about "self reference relation laravel"

Answer 2

It seems like you are having many to many relationship between user model as user and its friends(again a user).So, we can use belongsToMany() method to retrieve the friends of selected user as Users.
To do so, add the following function to your User model.

public function friends(){
    return $this->belongsToMany('App\User::class','friends','user_id','friend_id')->withPivot('accepted');
}

To get the friends of currently loged in User use following:

$friends = Auth::user()->friends()->get();