I’m facing an issue with eager loading in Laravel where a one-to-many relationship returns an empty collection, even though there is data present in the database. The same relationship works correctly when accessed using lazy loading.

I have two models, Institution and Social, where an Institution has many Socials. Despite there being related records in the socials table, eager loading of the socials relationship returns an empty collection. However, the same relationship returns data when accessed lazily.

The $institution->socials relationship works as expected when accessed using lazy loading (e.g., $institution->socials outside of load).
The issue occurs specifically with eager loading.

Social Model:

namespace AppModels;

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentFactoriesHasFactory;
use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;

class Social extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;

    public function institution()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Institution::class);
    }
}

Institution Model:

namespace AppModels;

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentFactoriesHasFactory;
use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;

class Institution extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;

    public function socials()
    {
        return $this->hasMany(Social::class);
    }
}

Controller Code:

public function show(Institution $institution)
{
    $allInstitutions = Institution::whereNotNull('rank')
                                  ->where('category_id', $institution->category->id)
                                  ->orderBy('rank')
                                  ->get();

    $institution->load([
        'schooltype',
        'category.institutions',
        'term',
        'catchments',
        'state.institutions',
        'state.region.institutions',
        'socials',
        'levels.programs' => function($query) use($institution) {
            $query->wherePivot('institution_id', $institution->id);
        }
    ]);

    dd($institution->socials); // Returns empty collection
}

Database Schema

**Institutions Table**

CREATE TABLE institutions (
    id VARCHAR(255) PRIMARY KEY,
    -- other columns
);

**Socials Table**

CREATE TABLE socials (
    id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    institution_id VARCHAR(255),
    -- other columns
    FOREIGN KEY (institution_id) REFERENCES institutions(id)
);

Query Log: Verified that the SQL query for loading socials executes correctly, but the collection returned is empty.

dd(DB::getQueryLog());

Direct Query: Manually querying the socials table shows that records with the correct institution_id are present.

$socials = Social::where('institution_id', $institution->id)->get();
dd($socials);

Cleared Caches: Used php artisan cache:clear, php artisan config:clear, and other cache clearing commands.
Data Integrity: Checked that the foreign key relationship is set up correctly and that the data in the socials table matches the institution_id.

php artisan cache:clear
php artisan config:clear
php artisan route:clear
php artisan view:clear

Testing in Isolation: Tested the eager loading in isolation to see if other parts of the code are affecting the results:

$institution = Institution::find($id);
$institution->load('socials');
dd($institution->socials);

N.B

Laravel 11
My local development server is XAMPP 8.2 (PHP 8.2, Mysql 8.0)

Thanks