Laravel - HasManyThrough in a different way - orm

Question

In the laravel docu is the following example for has-many-through relationship: Country has many posts through user.
But in my case i need something like this:
User has many roles through customer.
I would like to have the has-many-through relationship from user to role.
Is there a way to get it working this way?
EDIT
I solved my problem with a collection method:
public function roles() {
$roles = $this->hasMany('SC\Customer')->get()->each(function($item) {
return $item->role();
});
return $roles;
}

Answer 1

It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
In most cases where someone needs to define roles, creating a separate pivot table that joins tables would be a good way to do it.
Luckily, Laravel's documentation covers this pretty well, you will likely find the answer in this section: http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/eloquent-relationships#many-to-many
Keep reading through that section and all the way down, Taylor goes deeper into the subject and various solutions for different scenarios..
Let's say you have many users and many roles (admin, user, moderator) etc. Many of these users can have different roles and perhaps other attributes, such as if they are a customer or not. You start by creating the user, roles tables (or whatever else needed).
You can then create a joining pivot table, let's say role_user. In it, you can specify foreign keys like user_id which represents id from the user table and role_id which represents id from the role table.
By specifying the foreign keys, you attach a user to a role and then to whatever attribute you would like in another column. So if you have another column in the pivot table that is "customer", which can 1/0 (is customer / is not customer) or maybe you want to add another foreign key which can be customer_id that represents id column in a customer table.
It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but it's easy to get snowed in. Using a UML software to model it all out before actually coding to get a abstract overview, could be a good idea. I would recommend StarUML.
Then in your User model you can just bind them by specifying the relationships, something like this:
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Role')->withPivot('column1', 'column2');