Laravel Eloquent: How to use Logical Grouping on a pivot table

Question

My application has Users and Groups. They are related with a pivot table. The pivot table has nullable "joined" and "left" datetimes.

How do I use Logical Grouping on a pivot table?

I've tried:

$this->belongsToMany(User::class)->wherePivot(function ($query) use ($time) {
    $query->where('joined', null)->orWhere('joined', '<=', $time);
})
// and "left"
;

and

$this->belongsToMany(User::class)->where(function ($query) use ($time) {
    $query->wherePivot('joined', null)->orWherePivot('joined', '<=', $time);
})
// and "left"
;

but neither work. The first complains about passing a function as an argument that's expected to be a string, and the second complains about wherePivot not being defined.

Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

if you are in the Group model you can define:

public function joinedbefore()
{
   return $this->belongsToMany(User::class)->withPivot(['your pivot-columns'])->where(function ($query)  {
      $query->where('joined', null);//orWhere...
  });
}

Or:

public function joinedbefore()
{
       return $this->belongsToMany(User::class)->wherePivot('joined', null)->orWherePivot('joined', '<=',$var);
}

Then it can be called:

$group = Group::find(1);//or any other way
$group->joinedbefore()->get();