如何阻止'追随者'laravel

I have created the ability to add and remove friends in a laravel app using a pivot table and many to many relationship.

I am now stuck on the best way to handle blocking a member from friending another.

Right now I have a 'blocked' table with timestamps, blocked_user and created_by.

What would be the best way to check is that relationship exists in the block table before adding the friend?

Presuming you're using models. And that your User model has a relationship blockedUsers: Edit:

User extends Model {
    // ...
    public function isBlocked($userId)
    {
        return (boolean) $this->blockedUsers()
            ->where('blocked_user_id', $userId)->count();
    }
    public function blockedUsers()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(User::class, 'blocked_users_table', 'user_id', 'blocked_id');
    }
}

Just call this method wherever you think fits. You could call it from addFriend to check if this user is blocked or not.

the aproach could be like this:

$blocked_user = DB::table('blocked')
->where([
    ['created_by', '=', $user_id],
    ['blocked_user', '=', $blocked_user_id],
])
->first();

# user isn't blocked
if (empty($blocked_user)) {
    # add friend procedure
}