I’m using Laravel 10 (planning to switch to 11 soon) to expose an API. Below is a simplified version of the issue that I’m having.

I have a table with users and a table with groups, and I have a many-to-many relationship between them. The pivot table has a column created_at which basically comes down to the moment that the user joined the group. When a user is retrieved through the API, I’m fetching the related groups with the pivot. This results in a JSON that looks like this (omitting irrelevant parts)

{
  'groups':[
     {
        'name': 'group A',
        'pivot': {
            'created_at': '2024-...'
        }
     },
     ...
  ]
}

However, I would prefer an output that looks like this:

{
  'groups':[
     {
        'name': 'group A',
        'joined': '2024-...'
     },
     ...
  ]
}

What is the best way to achieve this? I could completely handcraft the JSON, but then I’m losing quite a lot. There are other endpoints that expose groups outside of the context of a user, and these should not be affected.