what to do with an inverted polymorphic relation? - laravel

Question

I have been trying to get my head around these polymorphic relationships all day. I might be over complicating/thinking it but. Can Laravel handle inverse polymorphic relationships? I have a registration flow that can have two types of field Models- normal field and customField.
When I loop through all the fields available it could pull the attributes from either NormalField or CustomField.
<?php
foreach($registrationFlow->fields->get() as $field)
{
echo $field->name; // could be custom field or could be normal field
}
?>
My difficulty is that, the example given in the docs works if you want to assign a photo to either staff or orders, but i want to assign either a customField or a normalField to a registrationFlow
*Edit
If you follow the example for the polymorphic many to many relationship, The tag class contains posts and videos- while i would want just a simple fields() method that relates to customField or normalField dependent on the type

Answer 1

First of all, you should take a look at the updated docs for Laravel 5.1: https://laravel.com/docs/5.1/eloquent-relationships#polymorphic-relations.
I think the difficulty with the example they provide is that the relationship between Photo and Staff/Product are "has-a" relationships, whereas you are trying to model an "is-a" relationship. However, you can model "is-a" essentially the same way. Take a look at this article: http://richardbagshaw.co.uk/laravel-user-types-and-polymorphic-relationships/.
Basically, the strategy is to define a generic model (and a generic table), perhaps in your case Field, that relates to your RegistrationFlow. You then have two subtype models, NormalField and CustomField, that have one-to-one relationships with Field. (there's your "is-a"). Thus, RegistrationFlow is indirectly related to your field subtypes.
Polymorphism comes in when you want to access the specific subtypes:
class Field extends Model {
public function fieldable()
{
return $this->morphTo();
}
}
Your base field table should have fieldable_id and fieldable_type columns defined (see the Eloquent docs).
You can then add methods to NormalField and CustomField that let you access the base model (your "inverse relationship"):
class NormalField {
public function field()
{
return $this->morphOne('Field', 'fieldable');
}
}
class CustomField {
public function field()
{
return $this->morphOne('Field', 'fieldable');
}
}
Usage:
$field = Field::find(1);
// Gets the specific subtype
$fieldable = $field->fieldable;