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 ofModels. 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:

1. Managepersistence of data andrelationship
2. Hold datain Memory
3. Implementbusiness 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.

useApp\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.

useApp\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.

useApp\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']);