Laravel eloquent Mass assignment from multi-dimentional array - php

Question

I'm creating a Restful application, so I'm recieving a POST request that could seem like this
$_POST = array (
'person' => array (
'id' => '1',
'name' => 'John Smith',
'age' => '45',
'city' => array (
'id' => '45',
'name' => 'London',
'country' => 'England',
),
),
);
I would like to save my person model and set its city_id.
I know that the easiest way is to set it manually with $person->city_id = $request['city']['id]; but this way isn't helping me....this code is only an example, in my real code, my model has 15 relationships
Is there any way to make it in a similar such as $person->fill($request);?
My models look like:
City
class City extends Model {
public $timestamps = false;
public $guarded= ['id'];//Used in order to prevent filling from mass assignment
public function people(){
return $this->hasMany('App\Models\Person', 'city_id');
}
}
Person
class Person extends Model {
public $timestamps = false;
public $guarded= ['id'];//Used in order to prevent filling from mass assignment
public function city(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Models\City', 'city_id');
}
public static function savePerson($request){//Im sending a Request::all() from parameter
$person = isset($request['id']) ? self::find($request['id']) : new self();
$person->fill($request);//This won't work since my $request array is multi dimentional
$person->save();
return $person;
}
}

Answer 1

This is a bit tricky, but you can override fill method in your model, and set deeplyNestedAttributes() for storing attributes thats will be looking for in the request
class Person extends Model {
public $timestamps = false;
public $guarded= ['id'];//Used in order to prevent filling from mass assignment
public function city(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Models\City', 'city_id');
}
public static function savePerson($request){//Im sending a Request::all() from parameter
$person = isset($request['id']) ? self::find($request['id']) : new self();
$person->fill($request);//This won't work since my $request array is multi dimentional
$person->save();
return $person;
}
public function deeplyNestedAttributes()
{
return [
'city_id',
// another attributes
];
}
public function fill(array $attributes = [])
{
$attrs = $attributes;
$nestedAttrs = $this->deeplyNestedAttributes();
foreach ($nestedAttrs as $attr) {
list($relationName, $relationAttr) = explode('_', $attr);
if ( array_key_exists($relationName, $attributes) ) {
if ( array_key_exists($relationAttr, $attributes[$relationName]) ) {
$attrs[$attr] = $attributes[$relationName][$relationAttr];
}
}
}
return parent::fill($attrs);
}
}