Overview
Eloquent is an object-relational mapper (ORM) that makes it enjoyable to interact with your database.
ORM allow us to have a neat structure within our codebase with concept of Models. A Model in this case will be a representation of a database row as well as entity relationship.
Concepts
A Model has mainly 3 responsibilities:
- Manage persistence of data and relationship
- Hold data in Memory
- Implement business logic
We will be focusing on some useful methods in Eloquent which encapsulate 2 responsibility in one. The benefit of this is it reduces codes and conditional statements in your logic.
2-in-1 Functions
Retrieving Or Creating Record
-
firstOrCreate()will attempt to retrieve a record using the given data. However in case the record was not found, new record will be created and persisted to the database using given data. -
firstOrNew()similar tofirstOrCreate()however if no records were found a new instance of the model will be returned with the given data but data will not automatically be persisted. A manual intervention will be required by callingsave()methods on the instance returned.
use App\Models\Flight;
// Retrieve flight by name
// or create it if it doesn't exist...
$flight = Flight::firstOrCreate([
'name' => 'London to Paris'
]);
// Retrieve flight by name
// or create it with the name, delayed, and arrival_time attributes...
$flight = Flight::firstOrCreate(
['name' => 'London to Paris'],
['delayed' => 1, 'arrival_time' => '11:30']
);
// Retrieve flight by name
// or instantiate a new Flight instance...
$flight = Flight::firstOrNew([
'name' => 'London to Paris'
]);
// Retrieve flight by name
// or instantiate with the name, delayed, and arrival_time attributes...
$flight = Flight::firstOrNew(
['name' => 'Tokyo to Sydney'],
['delayed' => 1, 'arrival_time' => '11:30']
);
Updating Or Creating Records
-
updateOrCreate()will attempt to update a record using the given data. However in case the record was not found, new record will be created and persisted to the database using given data.
use App\Models\Flight;
// Update flight where departure and destination with price and discounted
// or create new record with departure, destination, price and discounted
$flight = Flight::updateOrCreate(
['departure' => 'Oakland', 'destination' => 'San Diego'],
['price' => 99, 'discounted' => 1]
);
Updating Or Creating Records (Batch)
-
upsert()Enable us to inserts multiple rows into a database table if they do not already exist, or updates them if they do in a single query.
use App\Models\Flight;
// The method's first argument consists of the values to insert or update,
// while the second argument lists the column(s) that
// uniquely identify records within the associated table.
// While the third argument is an array of the columns
// that should be updated if a matching record
// already exists in the database.
Flight::upsert(
[
['departure' => 'Oakland', 'destination' => 'San Diego', 'price' => 99],
['departure' => 'Chicago', 'destination' => 'New York', 'price' => 150]
],
['departure', 'destination'],
['price']
);
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