Just a little trick

Nothing too much elaborate! This is a little useful trick to insert a record in a table for each result from a SQL query. It comes in handy for example when you have to manually populate intermediate table, in case of a many-to-many relationship.

Let’s take a basic example. Suppose that you have a list of products in your database and these products are related to a number of online stores.

SELECT * FROM product

---------------
| ID | Name   |
---------------
|  1 …

Introduction

Sometimes when developing a new site or application in Laravel you need to log exactly the route calls in order to track bugs and errors. This operation is straightforward.

First, let’s create a new Middleware

php artisan make:middleware LogRouteMiddleware

Then edit the handle function like the following:

<?php

public function handle($request, Closure $next)
{
    Log::info($request->fullUrl());

    return $next($request);
}

The fullUrl method logs the full …

Introduction

Since Laravel 4 there’s a handy feature that allows you to put your site in maintenance mode, providing a good way to hide your changes from external eyes. This feature is really helpful on your testing or production server since it doesn’t allow users to browse the site, so you can make you modifications pretty much unnoticed.

The artisan commands are the following:

php artisan down

to put the site into maintenance mode, and

php artisan up

to disable the …

Introduction

The Laravel documentation is great most of the time, but when you are stuck on a particular problem you have to figure by yourself what is the solution. Recently I had to create manually a paginator instance using the LengthAwarePaginator class. The first attempt was nearly a success, here a snippet of my controller:

<?php

$page = $request->has('page') ? $request->get('page') : 1;

$data = $this->userRepository->paginate($request->all(), …

Introduction

Recently, for a large website commissioned by the local agency for tourism, I had to design a system for storing Skibus timetables. The requirements were straightforward:

• store multiple bus lines;
• each line is a round trip, therefore it has two directions (outbound and return). But the route may not be the same;
• each line is effective between two dates

The aim of the website was to provide timetables to regular users using standard HTML tables instead of static PDF files, …

Introduction

This technique is really useful to check if an Eloquent relation is loaded on a Model, in order to efficiently generate an appended property.

For example, this approach is particularly useful in a multilingual application, where you can have an entity that has a number of related translations in different languages. Consider the following code:

<?php

class Entity extends Model
{
	public function translations()
	{
		return $this->hasMany('Translation');
	}
}

Our …