Laravel Eloquent relationship query not working - node.js

Question

I am attempting to build a query where a product is updated via an API. The application is built in Angular2 wrapped in a NodeJS layer.
A product has a many-to-many relationship with files. What I want to happen is that when data is sent to the API to update a file, a Eloquent query checks whether this relationship already exists and if not it adds a relationship into the 'file_product' table. I have this functionality working fine with a category many-to-many relationship but for some reason this is not working on the files relationship. here is my code:
Product Controller update function:
public function update(Request $request, $id)
{
if($id && is_numeric($id)) {
try {
$requestProductVars = $request->get('product');
$product = Product::find($id);
$product->title = $requestProductVars['title'];
$product->description = $requestProductVars['description'];
$product->images = json_encode($requestProductVars['images']);
$product->SKU = $requestProductVars['SKU'];
$product->manufacturer_id = $requestProductVars['manufacturer_id'];
$product->active = (($requestProductVars['active'] === true) ? '1' : '0');
if($request->get('categories')) {
$categories = $request->get('categories');
foreach($categories as $categoryId) {
$category = Category::find($categoryId);
if(!$product->categories->contains($category)) {
$product->categories()->save($category);
}
}
}
if(count($requestProductVars['files'])) {
$files = $requestProductVars['files'];
foreach($files as $file) {
$fileId = $file['id'];
$fileRecord = File::find($fileId);
if(!$product->files->contains($fileRecord)) {
$product->files()->save($fileRecord);
}
}
}
$product->save();
As you can see, I check to see if there is a 'files' property on the request and if there is I loop through each file, get the id and check if the relationship exists using:
if(!$product->files->contains($fileRecord)) {
The files property contains an array of File objects.
My code seems to stop here and doesn't even seem to execute if. The category functionality works fine in this code though which is odd and I am doing exactly the same thing here.
I checked the models for Product and File and the many-to-many relationships are defined here fine:
Product.php
/**
* Returns all files associated with a product
* #return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsToMany
*/
public function files() {
return $this->belongsToMany('App\File')->withTimestamps();
}
File.php
/**
* Returns all products related to a file
*
* #return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsToMany
*/
public function products() {
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Product')->withTimestamps();
}
Can anyone see why my code doesn't seem to be working?
Thanks

Answer 1

Ok I discovered what the problem was.
Before I abstracted out the files to products functionality I had a cell in the products table called 'files'. I had forgotten to delete this cell and this was causing a conflict when I was trying to query the files relationship. Hope this helps someone in the future.