In this section, we’ll explore how to retrieve a user’s following relationships with other users, including the ability to fetch approved, non-approved, and all followings. This feature is essential for managing the follow state of users and gaining deeper insights into these relationships.

Retrieve User Followings

The Laravel Followable package allows you to easily retrieve the following relationships for a user. You can access both the entire list of followings and more specific subsets like approved or not approved followings.

To get all the users that the current user is following, simply access the followings attribute. This will return all followings, including those that have not yet been approved.

$user->followings;

This will return a collection of all followings associated with the user, where the user is following others, but it may include both approved and non-approved relationships.

Retrieving Approved Followings

To get only the followings that the user has approved, use the approvedFollowings method:

$user->approvedFollowings;

This will return a collection of followings that have been accepted by the user, meaning the follow request has been approved.

Retrieving Non-Approved Followings

If you want to fetch the followings that the user has not yet approved, use the notApprovedFollowings method:

$user->notApprovedFollowings;

This collection will contain all the follow requests that the user has received but not yet accepted or rejected.

Looping Through Followings

You can loop through the followings to extract more details about each following relationship. Here’s how you can get the created_at date (the date the user followed) and access additional attributes of the followable model (like the user’s nickname).

foreach ($user->followings()->with('followable')->get() as $following) {
    // Date when the user followed
    $following->created_at;
 
    // Accessing the user attributes
    $following->followable->name;
}

Example: Fetch and Display Followings

Here’s a full example to demonstrate how to retrieve and display the user’s followings in a view.

Controller

// app/Http/Controllers/FollowingsController.php
 
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
 
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
 
class FollowingsController extends Controller
{
    public function index(User $user)
    {
        // Get the user's followings
        $followings = $user->followings()->with('followable')->get();
 
        return view('followings.index', compact('followings'));
    }
}