Usage of Eloquent objects as dictionary tables in Laravel - laravel

Question

I have different classes that act as "dictionary" lists, for example, for CarType class I hava table with id, value fields (1, 'small'; 2, 'big' ..)
Is there a way I can use such model as a map list (with cached data in memory) to have sometthing like that in my blade files:
{{ CartType->value($model->type_id) }}.
The idea would be
to load in memory all the data (or at leas after 2 requests of
different values)
to be easily to wrap around some fields of the model

Answer 1

You can do this with Eloquent (using relationships, as #TimLewis suggests), but it if's a simple map with just a few values (ie. not hundreds of different options), you'll probably find that Eloquent adds a lot of overhead for such a simple function.
Instead, I'd use database queries inside custom accessors. For example,
Imagine you have a Car Eloquent model and each car has exactly one "car type" value (denoted by a car_type field in the database).
Imagine that you also have a table in your database for listing car types, called (not surprisingly) car_types.
Here's a quick diagram:
|------------------|
|cars | |------------------|
|------------------| |car_types |
|id INT PRIMARY_KEY| |------------------|
|car_type_id INT | -- one-to-many --> |id INT PRIMARY_KEY|
|... | |name CHAR |
|------------------| |------------------|
You could set up an Eloquent model for car_type and define a relationship. That would work just fine, but do you really need all the functionality of an Eloquent model for this?
Instead, you could set up an accessor on the cars model:
class Car extends Eloquent {
public function getCarTypeAttribute()
{
return DB::table('car_types')
->select('name')
->where('id', '=', $this->car_type_id);
}
}
This will perform better than a full Eloquent model plus relationships.
But you also asked about caching the list. You could easily expand the example above to store the full list in the cache instead of querying each time:
class Car extends Eloquent {
public function getCarTypeAttribute()
{
$list = Cache::get('car_types_list');
if (!$list) {
$list = DB::table('car_types')->select('name');
// save in the cache for 60 minutes
Cache::put('car_types_list', $list, 60);
}
// search the list for the type ID
foreach ($list as $type) {
if ($type->id===$this->id) {
return $type;
}
}
// the type wasn't found
throw new Exception("That's not right!");
}
}
Now, if you have a Car model, you can get the type like this:
$car = Car::find(1234);
$type = $car->CarType;