Polymorphic Eloquent relationships with namespaces - laravel

Question

I've tried to implement polymorphic relationships. They work perfectly... However, I'm trying to reduce my database size as much as possible so... I've this
Table action
| id | realatable_type | relatable_id
| 1 | Lion\People | 65
| 2 | Lion\Company | 13
Obviously I've this
<?php namespace Lion;
class Company extends \Eloquent { ... }
class People extends \Eloquent { ... }
Is there any way to store only "People" or "Company" assuming that the namespace is always going to be "Lion"?

Answer 1

Since Laravel 4.1, inside your model (in this case Company and People) you can set the protected property $morphClass to whatever you want.
<?php namespace Lion;
class Company extends \Eloquent {
protected $morphClass = 'Company';
}
Now in your table you can store the type without the namespace:
| id | realatable_type | relatable_id
| 2 | Company | 13

Answer 2

I believe the best solution here (for database size at least) would be to simply change readable_type to ENUM('Lion\Company', 'Lion\People').
That being said, if you really want to handle this on Laravel side, you'll have to create new classes extending from Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Morph* ¹ and overwrite their constructors ² as to get only the last value after a dash, on $morphClass. Something like this:
<?php
use \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
class MyMorphOne extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\MorphOne {
public function __construct(Builder $query, Model $parent, $type, $id) {
parent::__construct($query, $parent, $type, $id);
$this->morphClass = substr($this->morphClass, strrpos($this->morphClass, '\\') + 1);
}
}
Then, extend your own model or base model, to overwrite morphOne, morphMany and morphToMany methods as to make use of your new extended classes. Something like this:
<?php
class People extends Eloquent {
// ...
public function morphOne($related, $name, $type = null, $id = null) {
$instance = new $related;
list($type, $id) = $this->getMorphs($name, $type, $id);
$table = $instance->getTable();
return new MyMorphOne($instance->newQuery(), $this, $table.'.'.$type, $table.'.'.$id);
}
}
* = One, Many and ToMany
Which are actually inherited from MorphOneOrMany on MorphOne and MorphMany.