How can I interrogate user activity in Laravel

Question

I'm looking for a way to best analyse the user data in our app.

for example

• how many users have read 0 articles on our site
• how many users have read 1 article on our site etc

we have a users table with id, username columns and we also have an activities table that creates an entry when an article is viewed. For example it would create a database row with

id	activity	user_id
1	read	1

all of the data we need is there, I just don't know how to interrogate to give that detail.

Answer 1

I personally would use an int code for activity and not a string. So "read" would = 1, "edit"=2...etc If you have no care about what user read with no association, that becomes easy by just setting a flag on the article that was read by article id. So your article table would have:

id   article_id   activity   user_id
1     5             1         8675309

From there just do an eloquent query on article_id where activity = 1...

$articlecount = Article::where('article_id', $request->id)->where('activity', 1)->count();

$articlecount will give you all of the reads for that article.

If you need it based on user you could do a one to many relationship from your users models to articles models. Then query the user with(articles). That will bring back all the articles where that user has activity. You could also specify in your eloquent to only bring back activity of reads/edits..etc too. In the same respect you could do the reverse and query the article and see all the users that have read that same article.