Laravel STI

This is my take at bringing Single Table Inheritance (STI) to the Eloquent ORM.

This package can be used outside of a laravel app

Installation

composer require phl/laravel-sti

Usage

Besides using the trait and adding the type column there is nothing much to do.

class Member extends Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model
{
    use PHL\LaravelSTI\STI;
}

Schema::create('members', function ($table) {
    // ...
    $table->type();
    // ...
});

You can now extend the Member model.

class PremiumMember extends Member
{
    //
}

class RegularMember extends Member
{
    //
}

And enjoy single table inheritance!

Configuration

Out of the box there is absolutely nothing to configure. You may want to change the defaults though.

Type column

By default the type column is named type if you want to use another name you can specify it in the migration and in the model.

class Member extends Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model
{
    use PHL\LaravelSTI\STI;

    protected static $stiTypeKey = 'custom_type_column'
}

Capsule::schema()->create('members', function ($table) {
    // ...
    $table->type('custom_type_column');
    // ...
});

Type value

If you do not want your type column to contain the class name you can use Eloquent's Relation::morphMap() function to add mapping between a name and a class.

Relation::morphMap([
    'regular_member' => RegularMember::class,
]);

Now the type column will be filled with regular_member instead of Member. This helps avoid leaking code details into the DB.

Read the source Luke!

If you are currious about the implementation details, the code and tests have been heavily documented :)