Well… after many iterations of DDG → Google searches… lo and behold, I came across this:
I guess my search on here was insufficient.
I tried seeing what it might take to do this as a behavior, but that didn’t seem any clearer. Then, the suggestion to denormalize my tags into a single column in every table was a total non-starter.
So I took @Zuluru’s suggestion in that thread … closed my eyes and just tried and hoped.
Instead of setting it up as a belongsToMany(), I created a belongsTo() for each each table using the entity_tags table in the EntityTagsTable.php model… I set up corresponding hasMany() relationships in my other tables back to EntityTags.
In each belongsTo(), I added 'setFinder' => ['tabl_name' => 'xxxxxxxxx'] (where xxxxxx is just whichever one of several tables I’m associating to EntityTags. (Because tabl_name is the name of the column in my bridge table that tells me which entity the f_key field is for).
Fingers crossed, I tweaked the view controller for one of those tables and threw in
'contain' => ['EntityTags','EntityTags.Tags'],
to my ->get()
And… I’m encouraged to report that that much of this whole adventure is indeed working!
Now I need to see how it works with actual tag assignment and saving (need to test the CUD in CRUD, although tags aren’t about U really… they’re C and D as far as write ops)
As well, I’m going to see if I can go full monty and use belongsToMany() in Tags instead of belongsTo() in EntityTags… if for no other reason than it will save me a level in the returned query results (i.e., “bypassing” EntityTags and just giving me actual tags per each record… as it is now, I have $xxxxxxx->entity_tags[n]->tags[y] )