Laravel Eloquent: How to select friend user model?

Question

I am trying to select all user objects of friends. A friend can either be the first user or the second user of the saved friendship. How do I do this using Eloquent?

Here is what I've tried:

$friends = Friend::select(array('users.id', 'users.name'))
->leftJoin('users', function($join)
    {
        $join->on('user_id_1', '=', 'users.id');
        // $join->on('user_id_2', '=', 'users.id');
    })
->where( ['user_id_1' => $myID, 'accepted' => '1'] )
->orWhere( ['user_id_2' => $myID, 'accepted' => '1'] )->get();"

Any ideas?

Edit

I found the option to use orOn. However, I still need to make sure the selected user isn't you.

Database structure

users
-----
id (int)
name (varchar)

friends
-----
id (int)
user_1 (int)
user_2 (int)
accepted (int)

Answer 1

You should query on you User and not on your Friend model because you want to receive a list of User objects. Next, you can just add another where clause to not get lines where the user_id matches the variable.

So the result would be something like this:

User::leftJoin('friends', function ($join) {
    $join->on('friends.user_id_1', '=', 'users.id')
        ->orOn('friends.user_id_2', '=', 'users.id');
})
->where(function ($query) use ($myID) {
    // Group orwhere functions so the query builder knows these belong together
    $query->where([
        'friends.user_id_1' => $myID,
        'friends.accepted' => true
    ])
    ->orWhere([
        'friends.user_id_2' => $myID,
        'friends.accepted' => true
    ]);
})
->where('users.id', '!=', $myID) // Exclude the user with id $myID
->get();