As a web developer, I understand the significance of creating flexible and scalable database relationships to build dynamic and interactive applications. In my journey with Laravel, my preferred PHP framework, I have been continuously impressed by its powerful features and elegant solutions for managing complex data connections.
Among these features, the "One To Many Polymorphic" relationship has stood out as an invaluable tool, empowering me to establish dynamic associations between different models and enabling seamless data sharing across diverse entities.
In this article, I will take you on a guided tour of the Laravel 10 One To Many Polymorphic relationship and its potential to revolutionize how we connect the "Post," "Comment," and "Video" tables in our database.
By harnessing the capabilities of this relationship, I can efficiently manage comments and interactions on posts while also creating a unified system to handle comments on videos, all while adhering to the principles of good database design.
Throughout our exploration, we will dive deep into the process of setting up the "Post," "Comment," and "Video" tables, defining eloquent models, and configuring the One To Many Polymorphic relationship.
To make things more tangible, I will provide real-world examples that demonstrate how this relationship can be practically applied in various scenarios, giving you a comprehensive understanding of its versatility.
A one-to-many polymorphic relation is similar to a typical one-to-many relation. The child model can belong to more than one type of model using a single association. One to many polymorphic relationship is used when a model belongs to more than one other model on a single association model.
So, let us embark on this enriching journey together, uncovering the power of the Laravel 10 One To Many Polymorphic relationship.
For example, users of your application can comment on posts and videos. Using polymorphic relationships, you may use a single comments table to contain comments for both posts and videos. using morphMany() and morphTo() you can access data.
In this example, we will create posts, comments, and videos tables. All tables are connected with each other like the below screenshot and we are creating migration and model for all tables and retrieving data using one to many polymorphic relationships in laravel 7, laravel 8, and laravel 9.
Post Table
Create a migration file for the "posts" table using the following command.
php artisan make:migration create_posts_table
Open the generated migration file located in the "database/migrations" directory and define the schema for the "posts" table.
Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->string("name");
$table->timestamps();
});
Comment Table
Create a migration file for the "comments" table using the following command.
php artisan make:migration create_comments_table
Open the generated migration file and define the schema for the "comments" table, including the necessary foreign key for the polymorphic relationship.
Schema::create('comments', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->text("comments");
$table->integer('commentable_id');
$table->string("commentable_type");
$table->timestamps();
});
Video Table
Create a migration file for the "videos" table using the following command.
php artisan make:migration create_videos_table
Open the generated migration file and define the schema for the "videos" table.
Schema::create('videos', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->string("title");
$table->timestamps();
});
Post Model
Create a new model file for the "Post" model using the following command.
php artisan make:model Post
Open the generated "Post" model file located in the "app/Models" directory and define the model.
class Post extends Model
{
/**
* Get all of the post's comments.
*/
public function comments()
{
return $this->morphMany(Comment::class, 'commentable');
}
}
Comment Model
Create a new model file for the "Comment" model using the following command.
php artisan make:model Comment
Open the generated "Comment" model file and define the model.
class Comment extends Model
{
/**
* Get the parent commentable model (post or video).
*/
public function commentable()
{
return $this->morphTo();
}
}
Video Model
Create a new model file for the "Video" model using the following command.
php artisan make:model Video
Open the generated "Video" model file and define the model.
class Video extends Model
{
/**
* Get all of the video's comments.
*/
public function comments()
{
return $this->morphMany(Comment::class, 'commentable');
}
}
In the "Post" and "Video" models, we have defined the morphMany relationship with the "Comment" model. This relationship allows us to easily retrieve all comments associated with a specific post or video.
In the "Comment" model, we have defined the morphTo relationship. This relationship enables us to access the parent "commentable" model, whether it's a post or a video, dynamically based on the "commentable_type" and "commentable_id" columns in the "comments" table.
Once your database table and models are defined, you may access the relationships via your model's dynamic relationship properties. For example, to access all of the comments for a post, we can use the comments property.
$post = Post::find(1);
foreach ($post->comments as $comment) {
//
}
You may also retrieve the parent of a polymorphic child model by accessing the name of the method like the below code.
$comment = Comment::find(1);
$commentable = $comment->commentable;
Now, we will give you an example of creating the record for one to many polymorphic relationships like the below code.
$post = Post::find(1);
$comment = new Comment;
$comment->comments = "this is test comments";
$post->comments()->save($comment);
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