Laravel Many to many self referencing table only works one way

Question

I have set up the relationship and the models as below:

pivot table schema

Schema::create('friend_user', function(Blueprint $table) {
    $table->increments('id');
    $table->integer('user_id')->unsigned();
    $table->integer('friend_id')->unsigned();
    $table->timestamps();
});

pivot table seeder (this defines two 'friendships' to which user '1' belongs one where user 1 is specified in the user_id and the second where user 1 is listed in the friend id):

    $friend_user = array(
        array(
            'id' => 1,
            'user_id' => 1,
            'friend_id' => 3,
        ),
        array(
            'id' => 2,
            'user_id' => 4,
            'friend_id' => 1,
        ),

    );

User model

public function friends()
{
 return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'friend_user', 'user_id', 'friend_id');
}

This is as suggested by Taylor Otwell here: https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/441

This all works but when I run the following command I get only one result:

foreach(Auth::user()->friends as $i) {
    var_dump($i->id);
}

This returns the value '3' but not 4 as expected. I understand why this is happening (as the user_id is not the friend_id) but how can I get this to return a collection of all friends belonging to a user (ie all friendships) regardless of which end of the connection (user_id or friend_id) the user is?

Solution

Instead of creating two records use a new function.

public function friends()
{
  return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'friend_user', 'user_id', 'friend_id');
}

// Same table, self referencing, but change the key order
public function theFriends()
{
  return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'friend_user', 'friend_id', 'user_id');
}

//You can then call opposite record(s) using:
foreach( Auth::user()->theFriends as $theFriends )

I used this approach in my project so I can have better separation for organizing the results.