How can I implement model revisions in Laravel? - php

Question

This question is for my pastebin app written in PHP.
I did a bit of a research, although I wasn't able to find a solution that matches my needs. I have a table with this structure:
+-----------+------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-----------+------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id | int(12) unsigned | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| author | varchar(50) | YES | | | |
| authorid | int(12) unsigned | YES | | NULL | |
| project | varchar(50) | YES | | | |
| timestamp | int(11) unsigned | NO | | NULL | |
| expire | int(11) unsigned | NO | | NULL | |
| title | varchar(25) | YES | | | |
| data | longtext | NO | | NULL | |
| language | varchar(50) | NO | | php | |
| password | varchar(60) | NO | | NULL | |
| salt | varchar(5) | NO | | NULL | |
| private | tinyint(1) | NO | | 0 | |
| hash | varchar(12) | NO | | NULL | |
| ip | varchar(50) | NO | | NULL | |
| urlkey | varchar(8) | YES | MUL | | |
| hits | int(11) | NO | | 0 | |
+-----------+------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
This is for a pastebin application. I basically want paste revisions so that if you open paste #1234, it shows all past revisions of that paste.
I thought of three ways:
Method 1
Have a revisions table with id and old_id or something and for each ID, I would insert all old revisions, so if my structure looks like this:
rev3: 1234
rev2: 1233
rev1: 1232
The table will contain this data:
+-------+----------+
| id | old_id |
+-------+----------+
| 1234 | 1233 |
| 1234 | 1232 |
| 1233 | 1232 |
+-------+----------+
The problem which I have with this is that it introduces a lot of duplicate data. And the more the revisions get, it has not only more data but I need to do N inserts for each new paste to the revisions table which is not great for a large N.
Method 2
I can add a child_id to the paste table at the top and just update that. And then, when fetching the paste, I will keep querying the db for each child_id and their child_id and so on... But the problem is, that will introduce too many DB reads each time a paste with many revisions is opened.
Method 3
Also involves a separate revisions table, but for the same scenario as method 1, it will store the data like this:
+-------+-----------------+
| id | old_id |
+-------+-----------------+
| 1234 | 1233,1232 |
| 1233 | 1232 |
+-------+-----------------+
And when someone opens paste 1234, I'll use an IN clause to fetch all child paste data there.
Which is the best approach? Or is there a better approach? I am using Laravel 4 framework that has Eloquent ORM.
EDIT: Can I do method 1 with a oneToMany relationship? I understand that I can use Eager Loading to fetch all the revisions, but how can I insert them without having to do a dirty hack?
EDIT: I figured out how to handle the above. I'll add an answer to close this question.

Answer 1

If you are on Laravel 4, give Revisionable a try. This might suite your needs

Answer 2

So here is what I am doing:
Say this is the revision flow:
1232 -> 1233 -> 1234
1232 -> 1235
So here is what my revision table will look like:
+----+--------+--------+
| id | new_id | old_id |
+----+--------+--------+
| 1 | 1233 | 1232 |
| 2 | 1234 | 1233 |
| 3 | 1234 | 1232 |
| 4 | 1235 | 1232 |
+----+--------+--------+
IDs 2 and 3 show that when I open 1234, it should show both 1233 and 1232 as revisions on the list.
Now the implementation bit: I will have the Paste model have a one to many relationship with the Revision model.
When I create a new revision for an existing paste, I will run a batch insert to add not only the current new_id and old_id pair, but pair the current new_id with all revisions that were associated with old_id.
When I open a paste - which I will do by querying new_id, I will essentially get all associated rows in the revisions table (using a function in the Paste model that defines hasMany('Revision', 'new_id')) and will display to the user.
I am also thinking about displaying the author of each revision in the "Revision history" section on the "view paste" page, so I think I'll also add an author column to the revision table so that I don't need to go back and query the main paste table to get the author.
So that's about it!

Answer 3

There are some great packages to help you keeping model revisions:
If you only want to keep the models revisions you can use:
Revisionable
If you also want to log any other actions, whenever you want, with custom data, you can use:
Laravel Activity Logger
Honorable mentions:
Activity Log. It also has a lot of options.