oldtimeguitarguy/eloquent-single-table-inheritance

Simple single table inheritance for eloquent models in Laravel & Lumen

Eloquent Single Table Inheritance

This is a very simple implementation of single table inheritance for Eloquent (Laravel & Lumen)., _(*1)

There are no attribute restrictions or anything that could be considered robust. There are other libraries that do those things quite well., _(*2)

This simply allows you to have a single table that, when fetched, is thrown into an Eloquent model of your choice, defined by a column in that table (typically "type", which is the default keyed type column. You can customize this)., _(*3)

For instance, imagine you have the following table (called people):, _(*4)

... and imagine you had the following classes:, _(*5)

class Person extends StiParent
{
    protected $table = 'people';
    protected static $stiKey = 'sex';
    protected static $stiChildren = [
        'boy' => Boy::class,
        'girl' => Girl::class,
    ];
}

class Boy extends Person
{
    //
}

class Girl extends Person
{
    //
}

When you fetch all people, you will get a mix of boys & girls in the collection., _(*6)

When you fetch just boys, you will get just boys., _(*7)

When you fetch just girls, you will get just girls., _(*8)

UNFORTUNATELY

1. You cannot make your Person class abstract.
2. You must specify the table on the parent
3. When creating a hasMany association, you must make sure you specify the foreign key. Otherwise, it will try to automatically generate one from the class name.