Laravel Eloquent polymorphic relationships to model hierarchy/inheritance - laravel-5

Question

I am modelling a report which depending on its type (missing person, wanted, etc) could contain different fields but each type shares a number of fields. This I think is what differentiates this question from say: this question where the fields are common across all types.
At the moment I have created a report model with an integer field indicating its type which references a type table. The advantage is that this is an easy model to understand and implement. It means that I can also easily search for objects. On the other hand, this means that some fields do not make sense for some models and thus are always null. As I add fields unique to the individual types I end up with many columns in the table of which many are null.
I would like some advice on using Laravel's (5.2) polymorphic relationships. The way I envision this is that I will have a base report model that contains all the shared fields and have the MorphTo fields; then have the different types separate containing their unique fields in a one-to-one relationship with the reports model. Is this possible and does this even make sense? The problems I see are that I lose the ability to search across all "reports" regardless of type. Or is there a way around this like say Java where inheritance allows for sub-classes to be considered members of the superclass?
A rough diagram of such relationships is shown below. Reports holds the shared fields while Wanted and Missing have unique fields.

Answer 1

From the diagram representing the relations in your question above, I think it is a straight forward case of parent - child.
Here, your BaseReport or Report is the parent model so to say and the WantedReport and MissingReport are the child - so to say.
Only thing which needs to be changed in your diagram is that you need to define the foreign key of report_id in your child tables to point to the parent record in the base reports table.
Table-reports
id // primary key
date
description
Table - wanted_reports
id //primary key
report_id //foreign key linking to the reports table
status_at
is_captured //maybe a boolean field
charge
Table - missing_reports
id //primary key
report_id //foreign key linking to the reports table
status_at
is_found
last_seen_date
last_seen_at
The you can define the corresponding models as - Report
<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Report extends Model
{
protected $table = 'reports';
protected $fillable = ['report_date', 'description'];
public function wanted_reports()
{
return $this->hasMany(WantedReport::class);
}
public function missing_reports()
{
return $this->hasMany(MissingReport::class);
}
}
WantedReport
<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class WantedReport extends Model
{
protected $table = 'wanted_reports';
protected $fillable = ['report_id', 'status_at', 'is_captured', 'charge'];
public function report()
{
return $this->belongsTo(Report::class);
}
}
MissingReport
<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class MissingReport extends Model
{
protected $table = 'missing_reports';
protected $fillable = ['report_id', 'status_at', 'is_found', 'last_seen_date', 'last_seen_at];
public function report()
{
return $this->belongsTo(Report::class);
}
}
Then anywhere in your application you can access the relations like you normally do, for example
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
class ReportsController
{
public function store(Request $$request)
{
$report = $this->model->create([
'report_date' => Carbon:::now(),
'description' => $request->get('description')
]);
if($report)
{
$wantedReport = $report->wanted_reports()->create([
'status_at' => $request->get('status'),
...
]);
$missingReport = $report->missing_reports()->create([
'status_at' => $request->get('status'),
...
]);
}
}
}
Hope this helps