Is a good idea reference a primary key using pivot table? - php

I'm developing a Laravel application right now and this doubt came to me. The proccess is: one customer make one or many requests of some products, then, I can offer one or many deals, based in their product requests.
I created the Product, Request and Deal Laravel models but I need to connect them. I set a many-to-many relationship with Product and Request models through belongsToMany method. My problem is how to set a relationship between Deal and the request. As I said, one deal can contain many request of a product or products.
The structures and relationships of the tables are:

I solved this creating a new model called RequestedProduct referred to "products_requests" table. Also, I dropped the primary key and add an Id attribute to this one.
Also, I need that the composite index (request_id, product_id) doesn't repeat in a row so, i created an unique index.

Related

establish a relationship among a table with many different table

i have a table (piovt table) that links the invoice id and the service id, but the service id does not come from one table but comes from different tables. here is an example of that.
i tried use polymorphic relations but i only get the last recored not all recoreds related to the invoice
so how to get the services from invoice table?
You can check the Has One Through relationship.
Laravel documentation states "The "has-one-through" relationship defines a one-to-one relationship with another model. However, this relationship indicates that the declaring model can be matched with one instance of another model by proceeding through a third model."
You can read more and get code examples here
Laravel has one through relationship

Fetching all pivot table columns via custom pivot type

I have a many-to-many relationship where the pivot table has about 20 additional columns. I am using a custom pivot class, and I have successfully set up the code to return an instance of that class when the ->pivot property is accessed on the relation, e.g.
$supplier->products->pivot returns the custom pivot class.
However, when wanting to access the data, I can manually define all the individual attributes of the pivot class (which extends Pivot by the way) in the belongsToMany relationship like this:
return $this->belongsToMany(Product::class, ['prop1', 'prop2', 'prop3'])
...But, how can I retrieve all the pivot data of the class without manually defining them as it ties the relationship declaration very close to the class? Is this possible. If not, it's going to make maintainability a PITA! Ideally, it'd be really nice if withPivot just had a flag to get it all!
In my circumstances, I found it easier to separate all the data into a separate table and model, and add a foreign key in the pivot table to the additional table record. This allows me to use the 'normal' model handling in Laravel and means I don't have to mess around with problems like this!
My use case was a schema of product and supplier with a many-to-many, and each supplier having their own data for the product, namely price, stock, shipping cost / times etc, so I moved all this from the pivot to a SupplierProduct model.
I'll leave this question here, as although this isn't the direct answer to the question (which I fear the answer is 'no'), this is a solution which is viable and can save quite a bit of coding frustration!

Sorting collection via nested relationships

Ok so I have an app that searches through course applications which each belong to an applicant. When I search the applications for a course title it returns the required result set but I would like to sort it by the applicant's date of birth.
How can I do this? I've tried sorting the collection doing $applications->sortBy('applicant.dob') but this seems to just order it by each applicant not the overall collection.
Edit
Here's all of my code... http://laravel.io/bin/PD81z
Any one have an idea how I can approach this?
Thanks!
OK
Your table course and table applicant are actually many-to-many relationship
For this to work, table course_applitions serves as a proxy to link the two table.
see the post, especially the part about many-to-many relationships
http://scotch.io/tutorials/php/a-guide-to-using-eloquent-orm-in-laravel
When fetching results from related tables using the above way, you can always add sort options.
Cheers!

Advice on database design for portfolio website

So I'm a visual designer type guy who has learned a respectable amount of PHP and a little SQL.
I am putting together a personal multimedia portfolio site. I'm using CI and loving it. The problem is I don't know squat about DB design and I keep rewriting (and breaking) my tables. Here is what I need.
I have a table to store the projects:
I want to do fulltext searcheson titles and descriptions so I think this needs to be MyISAM
PROJECTS
id
name (admin-only human readable)
title (headline for visitors to read)
description
date (the date the project was finished)
posted (timestamp when the project was posted)
Then I need tags:
I think I've figured this out. from researching.
TAGS
tag_id
tag_name
PROJECT_TAGS
project_id (foreign key PROJECTS TABLE)
tag_id (foreign key TAGS TABLE)
Here is the problem I have FOUR media types; Photo Albums, Flash Apps, Print Pieces, and Website Designs. no project can be of two types because (with one exception) they all require different logic to be displayed in the view. I am not sure whether to put the media type in the project table and join directly to the types table or use an intermediate table to define the relationships like the tags. I also thinking about parent-types/sub-types i.e.; Blogs, Projects - Flash, Projects - Web. I would really appreciate some direction.
Also maybe some help on how to efficiently query for the projects with the given solution.
The first think to address is your database engine, MyISAM. The database engine is how MySQL stores the data. For more information regarding MyISAM you can view: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/myisam-storage-engine.html. If you want to have referential integrity (which is recommended), you want your database engine to be InnoDB (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-storage-engine.html). InnoDB allows you to create foreign keys and enforce that foreign key relationship (I found out the hard way the MyISAM does not). MyISAM is the default engine for MySQL databases. If you are using phpMyAdmin (which is a highly recommended tool for MySQL and PHP development), you can easily change the engine type of the database (See: http://www.electrictoolbox.com/mysql-change-table-storage-engine/).
With that said, searches or queries can be done in both MyISAM and InnoDB database engines. You can also index the columns to make search queries (SELECT statements) faster, but the trade off will be that INSERT statements will take longer. If you database is not huge (i.e. millions of records), you shouldn't see a noticeable difference though.
In terms of your design, there are several things to address. The first thing to understand is an entity relationship diagram or an ERD. This is a diagram of your tables and their corresponding relationships.
There are several types of relationships that can exist: a one-to-one relationship, a one-to-many relationship, a many-to-many relationship, and a hierarchical or recursive relationship . A many-to-many relationship is the most complicated and cannot be produced directly within the database and must be resolved with an intermittent table (I will explain further with an example).
A one-to-one relationship is straightforward. An example of this is if you have an employee table with a list of all employees and a salary table with a list of all salaries. One employee can only have one salary and one salary can only belong to one employee.
With that being said, another element to add to the mix is cardinality. Cardinality refers to whether or not the relationship may exist or must exist. In the previous example of an employee, there has to be a relationship between the salary and the employee (or else the employee may not be paid). This the relationship is read as, an employee must have one and only one salary and a salary may or may not have one and only one employee (as a salary can exist without belonging to an employee).
The phrases "one and only one" refers to it being a one-to-one relationship. The phrases "must" and "may or may not" referring to a relationship requiring to exist or not being required. This translates into the design as my foreign key of salary id in the employee table cannot be null and in the salary table there is no foreign key referencing the employee.
EMPLOYEE
id PRIMARY KEY
name VARCHAR(100)
salary_id NOT NULL UNIQUE
SALARY
id PRIMARY KEY
amount INTEGER NOT NULL
The one-to-many relationship is defined as the potential of having more than one. For example, relating to your portfolio, a client may have one or more projects. Thus the foreign key field in the projects table client_id cannot be unique as it may be repeated.
The many-to-many relationship is defined where more than one can both ways. For example, as you have correctly shown, projects may have one or more tags and tags may assigned to one or more projects. Thus, you need the PROJECT_TAGS table to resolve that many-to-many.
In regards to addressing your question directly, you will want to create a separate media type table and if any potential exists whatsoever where a project is can be associated to multiple types, you would want to have an intermittent table and could add a field to the project_media_type table called primary_type which would allow you to distinguish the project type as primarily that media type although it could fall under other categories if you were to filter by category.
This brings me to recursive relationships. Because you have the potential to have a recursive relationship or media_types you will want to add a field called parent_id. You would add a foreign key index to parent_id referencing the id of the media_type table. It must allow nulls as all of your top level parent media_types will have a null value for parent_id. Thus to select all parent media_types you could use:
SELECT * FROM media_type WHERE parent_id IS NULL
Then, to get the children you loop through each of the parents and could use the following query:
SELECT * FROM media_type WHERE parent_id = {$media_type_row->id}
This would need to be in a recursive function so you loop until there are no more children. An example of this using PHP related to hierarchical categories can be viewed at recursive function category database.
I hope this helps and know it's a lot but essentially, I tried to highlight a whole semester of database design and modeling. If you need any more information, I can attach an example ERD as well.
Another posibble idea is to add columns to projects table that would satisfy all media types needs and then while editting data you will use only certain columns needed for given media type.
That would be more database efficient (less joins).
If your media types are not very different in columns you need I would choose that aproach.
If they differ a lot, I would choose #cosmicsafari recommendation.
Why don't you take whats common to all and put that in a table & have the specific stuff in tables themelves, that way you can search through all the titles & descriptions in one.
Basic Table
- ID int
- Name varchar()
- Title varchar()
etc
Blogs
-ID int (just an auto_increment key)
-basicID int (this matches the id of the item in the basic table)
etc
Have one for each media type. That way you can do a search on all the descriptions & titles at the one time and load the appropriate data when the person clicked through the link from a search page. (I assume thats the sort of functionality you mean when you say you want to be able to let people search.)

Difference between HABTM relationship and 2 $belongsTo relationship with a third model

I'm creating a project management system which projects are assigned to users
What's the difference between creating a Model ProjectsUser and defining 2 $belongsTo relationship and defining HABTM relationships in both Project and User models? What would be the most correct way, though? And how do I save the data in the projects_users table?
From my experience, if you want to be able to save or delete rows only from the join table (the one with 2 IDs), then it is much more simple using three models associated through both a hasMany and a belongsTo association.
You can also retrieve data from the join table directly and do the queries you want much more easily
This is what CakePHP documentation says refering to HABTM and saving data:
However, in most cases it’s easier to make a model for the join table and setup hasMany, belongsTo associations as shown in example above instead of using HABTM association.
Here you can find more the full text:
http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/models/saving-your-data.html#what-to-do-when-habtm-becomes-complicated
I have used this method for a "reads" table (with post_id and user_id) as well as for subscriptions and similar kind of relationships.
The first way is called "hasAndBelongsToMany" [details here].
The second is called "hasMany through" [details here].
The second link relating to "hasMany through" has details and a lengthy explanation about when and why you would want to use it.
Not sure about the specifics of cakephp, but in general defining the relation model explicitly gives you more control over it, for instance if you wanted to do some validation or add callbacks on creation of this relationship.

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