0009-models-eloquent.md

Laravel Tinker

Tinker is a console program that allows you to play around with Laravel models and execute arbitraty PHP command directly from your command line

Starting the console

php artisan tinker

Solving a problem with Tinker (for PHP 7.3 or newer) when it quits after every command

Modify the php.ini by adding this option

pcre.jit=0

On Mac php.ini can be usually found in /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/etc/php.ini

To be sure where it is, run php -i | grep 'php.ini' in Terminal

On Windows it's in your XAMPP folder C:\xampp\php\php.ini or C:\xampp\etc\php.ini, depending on location of XAMPP itself

Eloquent Model

Generating a new model

php artisan make:model BlogPost

Generating a new model with migration

php artisan make:model BlogPost --migration
// or
php artisan make:model BlogPost -m

By convention, Laravel assumes the table name is "snake case" plural model name. For example:

Model name	Table name
BlogPost	blog_posts
Blogpost	blogposts
VeryLongTrain	very_long_trains

To define a custom name, add (override) the protected $table model property

class BlogPost extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'blogposts';
}

By default, all models are stored inside the App namespace, eg. App\BlogPost

Acessing and modifying properties

You can read and modify model properties (row columns) using properties

$post = App\BlogPost::find(1);
$title = $post->title;
$content = $post->content;

$post->title = 'New title';
$post->content = 'New content';
// Always call save() to create the record and UPDATE the existing one
$post->save();

Property name corresponds 1:1 to the column name of the table

Querying

Retrieving all models as collection

$posts = App\BlogPost::all();

Retrieving single model by primary key (usually, by id property/column)

// Fetch BlogPost with id 10
$post = App\BlogPost::find(10);

Fetching collection of models by id

$posts = App\BlogPost::find([1, 2, 3]);

Collections are iterable (eg. using foreach)

$posts = App\BlogPost::all();

foreach ($posts as $post) {
	echo $post->title;
}

Getting first element of the collection of models

$posts = App\BlogPost::all();
$post = $posts->first();

Creating and saving (creating a database row) a new model

$post = new App\BlogPost();
$post->title = 'Title';
$post->content = 'Content';
$post->save();