Laravel - update model relationship to another model

Question

There is a many-to-many relationship between the event model and the patient model. An incident can involve multiple patients, and a patient can be involved in multiple incidents.

If the user creates a copy of the patient model, we want to be able to merge the two patient models into one. This means I want to move the events involving patient 1 to patient 2, including other attributes on the pivot table.

I tried simple things

Casualty::where('patient_id', $patientOne->getKey())->update(['patient_id' => $patientTwo- >getKey()]);

But that doesn’t work. Using the updateOnExistingPivot() method means I need to iterate through each event for Patient 1 and run a separate database query to update the patient to Patient 2.

I also tried updating the record like this

$patientOne->incidents()->update(['patient_id' => $patientTwo->getKey()]);< /pre>
This also doesn't work because there is no patent_id column on the events table. 
How can I achieve this, or am I doing something wrong? 

Answer 1

Not sure if I understand what you mean, do you want to attribute more patients to the same incident? You can use the belongsToMany relationship and create a pivot table. Then when you want to update the data, just use the sync method.

You could also try using json_encode() to store them in a column that just holds the user ID and retrieve them later.

Sorry, can't provide more information because the problem is not well described.