Laravel eloquent multiple belongsTo seeding - php

Question

I have three models, User, Category and Article.
Article belongs to both a User and a Category where the foreign keys user_id and category_id are not null.
Am lost trying to seed the database with fake data via factories accordingly, here's the seeding code...
// 2 categories and 12 articles, 6 per category
// TODO: A user should have 6 articles with mixed categories
// 3 from each category
// So we will have 2 users
factory(Category::class, 2)->create()->each(function($category) {
factory(User::class)->create()->each(function($user) use ($category) {
// How to assign an Article to $category or $user while creating?
$user->articles()->createMany(
factory(Article::class, 3)->make()->toArray()
); // category_id can't be null
// OR
$category->articles()->createMany(
factory(Article::class, 3)->make()->toArray()
); // user_id can't be null
});
});
I'll get one of two errors, either
Column user_id doesn't have a default value
Or
Column category_id doesn't have a default value
Which is logical due to the Article table migration
$table->increments('id');
$table->unsignedInteger('user_id');
$table->foreign('user_id')->references('id')->on('users')->onDelete('cascade');
$table->unsignedInteger('category_id');
$table->foreign('category_id')->references('id')->on('categories')->onDelete('cascade');
How can I pass the category_id or user_id to the factory call?
Is there a better way to acheive this?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can override attributes for your factory by passing an array with the desired attributes to the make() method:
Change
$user->articles()->createMany(
factory(Article::class, 3)->make()->toArray()
);
to
$user->articles()->createMany(
factory(Article::class, 3)->make([
'category_id' => $category->id
])->toArray()
);
to override the category_id attribute.
https://laravel.com/docs/6.x/database-testing#using-factories

Answer 2

Seed the categories separately.
Then seed the users and inside it seed the articles.
In the article factory file ArticleFactory:
$factory->define(App\Article::class, function (Faker $faker) {
return [
'category_id' => App\Category::inRandomOrder()->value('id'),
....
'created_at' => time(),
'updated_at' => time(),
];
});

Answer 3

This may help you
First
make users create when you make a new article from factory
$factory->define(App\Article::class, function ($faker) use ($factory) {
return [
'user_id' => $factory->create(App\User::class)->id,
'title' => $faker->sentence,
'body' => $faker->paragraph
];
});
Second
from your seeder
in this example i will make 3 categories * 6 Articles
factory('App\Category', 3)->create()->each(function($u) {
$u->posts()->save(factory('App\Article', 6)->create());
});