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Special✨

Sometimes, certain database records are just special✨, and you need to reference them inside your code.

You might have a few special vendors that have special handling in a few special places, and maybe their own special artisan commands run from time-to-time.

special✨ lets you use backed enums to reference Eloquent models. Rather than backing your enum with a string or integer, think of it as backing your enum with a database record.

If the record is missing, you can let special✨ automatically create it for you. This is especially great in testing, where you may have a few special records that need to exist for a few special tests, but you don't want to track which tests need to run special seeders at setup.

Installation

Usage

To start, create a new enum and use the EloquentBacking trait provided by this package.

You can optionally add a CreateWith attribute to any of your enum cases, and special✨ will use those values to automatically create the model record for you if it's missing.

Now, you can use those enums to access the backing models. By default, strings are assumed to be a slug column, and integers are assumed to be the id column, but this can be configured at the project level or the individual enum level.

Special enums decorate the underlying model, so you can often just call the enum as though it were the model itself. But sometimes you want the actual copy of the model instance, which you can do with:

Using the primary key cache

Often, the only reason you need a special enum is to use its primary key in another query or to set up a relationship. Special✨ keeps a cache of the 50 most recently-used primary keys so that in many cases, you don't have to do a single database lookup. You can configure the number of keys cached and the cache TTL by publishing the package config.

As long as SpecialOrganizations::Laravel has been used in the last hour, the 'organization_id' value can be set without making a single query to the database.

Due to the nature of these kinds of enums, this is usually pretty safe, since they're used with the types of records that aren't likely to change in your application ever. That said, you can always clear the cache at any time with php artisan cache:clear-special-keys.

Using with Laravel relations

Often times you want to use a special enum to look up related models. We provide a few convenient ways to do this:

Or, you can use a special enum to constrain an existing query. The exact same query can be generated with:

The constrain() method (and forSpecial macro) both use the primary key cache under the hood. This means that most relational queries using special enums will not trigger any additional database queries.

Automatic Model Observation

Special✨ automatically registers model observers for any model that you retrieve. This means that if you update or delete a special model during a request, subsequent calls to the enum will automatically reflect those changes.

This works regardless of whether the updated model was retrieved using the package.