Laravel Eloquent ORM 2-in-1 Methods

Overview

Eloquent is an object-relational mapper (ORM) that makes it enjoyable to interact with your database.

ORM allow us to have a neat structure within our codebase with concept of Models. A Model in this case will be a representation of a database row as well as entity relationship.

Concepts

A Model has mainly 3 responsibilities:

Manage persistence of data and relationship
Hold data in Memory
Implement business logic

We will be focusing on some useful methods in Eloquent which encapsulate 2 responsibility in one. The benefit of this is it reduces codes and conditional statements in your logic.

2-in-1 Functions

Retrieving Or Creating Record

firstOrCreate() will attempt to retrieve a record using the given data. However in case the record was not found, new record will be created and persisted to the database using given data.
firstOrNew() similar to firstOrCreate() however if no records were found a new instance of the model will be returned with the given data but data will not automatically be persisted. A manual intervention will be required by calling save() methods on the instance returned.

use App\Models\Flight;

// Retrieve flight by name 
// or create it if it doesn't exist...
$flight = Flight::firstOrCreate([
    'name' => 'London to Paris'
]);

// Retrieve flight by name 
// or create it with the name, delayed, and arrival_time attributes...
$flight = Flight::firstOrCreate(
    ['name' => 'London to Paris'],
    ['delayed' => 1, 'arrival_time' => '11:30']
);

// Retrieve flight by name 
// or instantiate a new Flight instance...
$flight = Flight::firstOrNew([
    'name' => 'London to Paris'
]);

// Retrieve flight by name 
// or instantiate with the name, delayed, and arrival_time attributes...
$flight = Flight::firstOrNew(
    ['name' => 'Tokyo to Sydney'],
    ['delayed' => 1, 'arrival_time' => '11:30']
);

Updating Or Creating Records

updateOrCreate() will attempt to update a record using the given data. However in case the record was not found, new record will be created and persisted to the database using given data.

use App\Models\Flight;

// Update flight where departure and destination with price and discounted 
// or create new record with departure, destination, price and discounted
$flight = Flight::updateOrCreate(
    ['departure' => 'Oakland', 'destination' => 'San Diego'],
    ['price' => 99, 'discounted' => 1]
);

Updating Or Creating Records (Batch)

upsert() Enable us to inserts multiple rows into a database table if they do not already exist, or updates them if they do in a single query.

use App\Models\Flight;

// The method's first argument consists of the values to insert or update, 
// while the second argument lists the column(s) that 
// uniquely identify records within the associated table.

// While the third argument is an array of the columns 
// that should be updated if a matching record 
// already exists in the database.
Flight::upsert(
    [
        ['departure' => 'Oakland', 'destination' => 'San Diego', 'price' => 99],
        ['departure' => 'Chicago', 'destination' => 'New York', 'price' => 150]
    ],
    ['departure', 'destination'],
    ['price']
);

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