Nested comments with Laravel - php

Question

I'm currently trying to replicate something similar to a forum, but I'm stumped on how I could create nested comments. I understand that for regular replies I could create a replies table and run a loop for each comment that matches the thread id. But I don't know how I would easily do this for nested replies.
Could someone please give me some advice or point me in the right direction? Thanks.
This is the structure for my posts table:
Screenshot of phpMyAdmin http://bitdrops.co/drops/J5v.png

Answer 1

You want to look into polymorphic relations to solve this. You want to be able to comment on Posts and Comments.
What I have done is set up a commentable trait and have the models I want to add comments to use it. This way if you ever want to comment on another model, you can just add the trait to that model.
Laracasts is a great resource for laravel and has a good lesson on traits.
There is a bit more to it than this, but hopefully it will get you started.
You set up your database structure like this.
User Table
`id` int(10),
`name` varchar(255),
`username` varchar(255)
Comments table
`id` int(10),
`user_id` int(10),
`body` text,
`commentable_id` int(10),
`commentable_type` varchar(255)
Posts Table
`id` int(10),
`user_id` int(10),
`body` text
Your models like this.
Comment Model
<?php namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Comment extends Model {
use CommentableTrait;
/**
* Get all of the owning commentable models.
*/
public function commentable()
{
return $this->morphTo();
}
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\User');
}
}
Post Model
<?php namespace App;
use CommentableTrait;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Post extends Model {
use CommentableTrait;
}
and of course you need the trait.
Trait
<?php namespace App;
use Comment;
trait CommentableTrait {
/**
* List of users who have favorited this item
* #return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\MorphToMany
*/
public function comments()
{
return $this->morphMany('App\Comments\Comment', 'commentable')->latest();
}
/**
* #return \Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse
*/
public function addComment($body, $user_id)
{
$comment = new Comment();
$comment->body = $body;
$comment->user_id = $user_id;
$this->comments()->save($comment);
return $comment;
}
}