Laravel eloquent table-less data from external source - php

Question

I'm developing an application where my data comes from external server in JSON format.
I would like to set a relationships between each models, but without using a database table.
Is it possible ?
Something like that:
<?php
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Flight extends Model
{
/**
* The table associated with the model.
*
* #var string
*/
protected $table = 'https://.../server/flights.json';
}

Answer 1

You could make a service class which handles the request and returns class instances:
namespace App\Services;
class FlightService
{
/**
* #var FlightFactory
*/
private $flightFactory;
public function __construct(FlightFactory $flightFactory)
{
$this->flightFactory = $flightFactory;
}
public function getAllFlights()
{
$flightsJson = $this->getFromExternalCurl();
return $this->flightFactory->buildFlightList($flightsJson);
}
private function getFromExternalCurl()
{
return Curl::to('http://www.foo.com/flights.json')
->withData( array( 'foz' => 'baz' ) )
->asJson()
->get();
}
}
Basically the service would make the external API call and the response is passed to a factory which creates the instances.
Note that you just need to add the factory in the construct and it's binded because laravel uses https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/container
namespace App\Factories;
class FlightFactory
{
public function buildFlightList($flightJsonList)
{
$flightCollection = collect();
foreach($flightJsonList as $flightJson) {
$flightCollection->push($this->buildFlight($flightJson));
}
return $flightCollection;
}
public function buildFlight($flightJson)
{
$flight = new Flight();
// add properties
return $flight;
}
}
The factory will return a Collection which is verry usefull because it contains usefull methods, or you can return an array.
In this example I used a curl library https://github.com/ixudra/curl but it can be replaced with native php or other libraries.
Then you can use by injecting the FlightService in your controllers.
P.S: Code not tested but represents a possible approach