Thread by @mmartin_joo

🔥Every #Laravel Eloquent Recipes You’ll Ever Need

I’ve collected my 35 best performing Eloquent-related tweets and put them together in one huge thread. You’ll also find a downloadable PDF below.

🧵Terra-Thread is coming!

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Attribute Cast

In Laravel 8 you can define an accessor in one method with an Attribute cast:

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whereRelation

This example: give every Holding where the Stock relation's ticker column is equal to AAPL:

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whereBelongsTo

You don’t have to compare IDs anymore:

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Invisible Database Columns

It’s a new concept in MySQL 8. What it does: when you run a select * query it won't retrieve any invisible column. If you need an invisible column's value you have to specify it explicitly in the select statement.

And now, Laravel supports this:

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saveQuietly

If you ever need to save a model but you don't want to trigger any model events, you can use this method:

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oldestOfMany

There's a special relationship called oldestOfMany. You can use it if you constantly need the oldest model from a hasMany relationship:

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Default Attribute Values

You can specify default attribute values in migrations and in the Model as well:

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Find with an array of IDs

Everyone knows about the find method, but did you know that it accepts an array of IDs?

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Get Dirty

In Eloquent you can check if a model is "dirty" or not. Dirty means it has some changes that are not persisted yet:

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withDefault

If you have a nullable relationship you can easily end up checking for null values all over the place. Fortunately, the withDefault method solves this problem:

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❗Stop bookmarking

I've put together a 34 pages PDF from these tips. You can download it here (free):

martinjoo.gumroad.com/l/laravel-eloq…

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Boot Eloquent Traits

We all write traits that are being used by Eloquent models. If you need to initialize something in your trait when an event happened in the model, you can boot your trait:

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updateOrCreate

Creating and updating a model often use the same logic. Fortunately Eloquent provides a very convenient method called updateOrCreate.

It will run an update query if the model exists and an insert query if it does not exist:

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upsert

If you want to run multiple update or create operations you can use the upsert:

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when

We often need to append a where clause to a query based on some conditional, for example, a Request parameter. Instead of if statements you can use the when method:

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appends

If you have an attribute accessor and you often need it when the model is converted into JSON you can use the $appends property.

It’s useful when you’re working with Blade:

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latestOfMany

Similarly to oldestOfMany we can use the latestOfMany as well:

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ofMany

You can also use the ofMany relationship with custom logic, for example:

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hasManyThrough

Consider this: Department → has many → Employee → has many → Paycheck

You can define a hasManyThrough relationship on the Department model that will return Paychecks through the Employee model:

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hasManyDeep

Okay, this is clickbait, because there is no hasManyDeep relationship in Laravel but there is an excellent package called eloquent-has-many-deep.

Consider the following relationships:

Country -> has many -> User -> has many -> Post -> has many -> Comment

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Push

Sometimes you need to save a model and its relationship as well. In this case, you can use the push method:

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withAvg

In this example, we have a Book and a Rating model. A book has many ratings. Let's say we need to order the books by the average rating.

We can use the withAvg method:

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Eager Loading Specific Columns

select * queries can be slow and memory-consuming. If you want to eager a relationship but you don't need every column, you can specify which ones you want to load:

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saveMany

With the saveMany function, you can save multiple related models in one function call.

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createMany

Similarly to saveMany you can also use the createMany if you don't have models, but arrays instead:

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foreignId & constrained

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nullOnDelete

If you have a nullable relationship just use the nullOnDelete helper:

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afterCreating

There's an afterCreating method on the Factory class that you can use to do something after a Model has been created.

When I have Users with profile pictures, I always use this feature:

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Factory For

Instead of creating the category and passing it as an attribute, you can use the for method:

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Factory Has

With the has method you can do the inverse of the relationship. So you can use this for has many relationships:

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Factory States

When working with factories in tests (or seeders) we often need a specific 'state' in a given model. Let's say we have a Product model and it has an active column.

You can do this:

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Log Every Database Query

We often want to see every database query that was executed in a request during development. There are multiple solutions, but here's the most simple one:

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whenLoaded

You can avoid N+1 queries in API resources by using the whenLoaded() method. This will only append the department if it’s already loaded in the Employee model.

Without whenLoaded() there is always a query for the department:

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Pagination Links With Query String

If you have pagination in your project and you want to keep the query string from the request URL you can use the withQueryString() method.

Otherwise, your query string will be lost in the pagination links.

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If you have a logic in your application that deletes some old or unused rows from the database, you can use the Prunable trait.

You don't need to write your own command, you can schedule the one provided by Laravel:

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Custom Query Builder

With Eloquent you can define your own query builders for your models. By using this you can move your scopes and queries from your models.

https://twitter.com/mmartin_joo/status/1468916731037065218

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You made it... You’re a beast! 💪

I have a ton of other tweets like above so give this guy a follow: @mmartin_joo