Use Eloquent scope on each eager loaded element in Laravel - php

Question

I have a situation like this. There are authors and books. books belong to authors and authors have many books.
There is also another table publish_year where different years have primary keys cast against them. i.e. year 2005 has primary key 1, year 2006 has primary key 2 etc.
Now, on the books table, the year_id is the foreign key that refers to the primary key of the publish_year table. Now I want to eager load all the authors with their books for a specific year (which is made active from the admin panel).
I have developed the following eloquent query. Models are Author, Book and PublishYear. There are some additional where conditions performed on the query.
return Author::with(['books' => function($query) {
$query->where('year_id', '=', PublishYear::where('is_active', '=', 1)->pluck('id'))
->where('is_available', '=', 't')
....;
}])->get();
It works. Now is there any way to use a scope inside the query like this:
return Author::with(['books' => function($query) {
$query->scope();
}
So, that I can abstract away the implementation detail from the controller.

Answer 1

We use a repository design pattern for this.
The repository mediates between the data source layer and the business
layers of the application. It queries the data source for the data,
maps the data from the data source to a business entity, and persists
changes in the business entity to the data source. A repository
separates the business logic from the interactions with the underlying
data source or Web service.
Laravel has great support for repository design using interfaces. In our current webhosting control panel it's widely used to facilitate our complex data structures with multiple relations.
Ryan Tablada has a nice article describing the exact benefits: http://ryantablada.com/post/two-design-patterns-that-will-make-your-applications-better
If you need some more code examples see this heera.it article that goes more into detail about how to implement it: http://heera.it/laravel-repository-pattern

Answer 2

I you declare a scope function in your Book model, you should be able do use it in your query.
Book.php
public function scopePublishingYear($query, $year)
{
return $query->where('year_id', $year)->where('is_available','t');
}
And in your controller:
$year = PublishYear::where('is_active', '=', 1)->pluck('id');
return Author::with(['books' => function($query) use($year) {
$query->publishingYear($year);
}
But, as Luceos said, if you want to keep your controller ever cleaner, you can use a repository pattern and be able to write something like this:
return $this->authorRepository->getWithBooks()