Laravel 4 - Scope to only show rows where another DB has no relational items

Question

I have a cars table, and a car_image table.

I want to get all the cars that have NO images in the car_image.

In my car model I am making a scope:

public function scopeNoImages($query)
{
    return $query-> ??
}

How can I create a scope that will show only results from the cars table that have no related rows in the pivot table?

Answer 1

Assuming the car_image consists of the images of the cars:

In your Car model:

public function images()
{
    return $this->hasMany('CarImage');
}

In your CarImage model:

public function car()
{
    return $this->belongsTo('Car');
}

Now you can load the cars without images like so:

return Car::doesntHave('images')->get();

Using: doesntHave.