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Rinvex Categories

Rinvex Categories is a polymorphic Laravel package, for category management. You can categorize any eloquent model with ease, and utilize the power of Nested Sets, and the awesomeness of Sluggable, and Translatable models out of the box.

Installation

1. Install the package via composer:

2. Publish resources (migrations and config files):

3. Execute migrations via the following command:

4. Done!

Usage

To add categories support to your eloquent models simply use \Rinvex\Categories\Traits\Categorizable trait.

Manage your categories

Your categories are just normal eloquent models, so you can deal with it like so. Nothing special here!

Notes: since Rinvex Categories extends and utilizes other awesome packages, checkout the following documentations for further details:

• Powerful Nested Sets using kalnoy/nestedset
• Automatic Slugging using spatie/laravel-sluggable
• Translatable out of the box using spatie/laravel-translatable

Manage your categorizable model

The API is intutive and very straightforward, so let's give it a quick look:

You can attach categories in various ways:

Notes:

• The attachCategories() method attach the given categories to the model without touching the currently attached categories, while there's the syncCategories() method that can detach any records that's not in the given items, this method takes a second optional boolean parameter that's set detaching flag to true or false.
• To detach model categories you can use the detachCategories() method, which uses exactly the same signature as the attachCategories() method, with additional feature of detaching all currently attached categories by passing null or nothing to that method as follows: $post->detachCategories();.

And as you may have expected, you can check if categories attached:

Notes:

• The hasAnyCategories() method check if ANY of the given categories are attached to the model. It returns boolean true or false as a result.
• Similarly the hasAllCategories() method uses exactly the same signature as the hasAnyCategories() method, but it behaves differently and performs a strict comparison to check if ALL of the given categories are attached.

Advanced usage

Generate category slugs

Rinvex Categories auto generates slugs and auto detect and insert default translation for you if not provided, but you still can pass it explicitly through normal eloquent create method, as follows:

Note: Check Sluggable package for further details.

Smart parameter detection

Rinvex Categories methods that accept list of categories are smart enough to handle almost all kinds of inputs as you've seen in the above examples. It will check input type and behave accordingly.

Retrieve all models attached to the category

You may encounter a situation where you need to get all models attached to certain category, you do so with ease as follows:

Query scopes

Yes, Rinvex Categories shipped with few awesome query scopes for your convenience, usage example:

Notes:

• The withAnyCategories() scope finds posts with ANY attached categories of the given. It returns normally a query builder, so you can chain it or call get() method for example to execute and get results.
• Similarly there's few other scopes like withAllCategories() that finds posts with ALL attached categories of the given, withoutCategories() which finds posts without ANY attached categories of the given, and lastly withoutAnyCategories() which find posts without ANY attached categories at all. All scopes are created equal, with same signature, and returns query builder.

Category translations

Manage category translations with ease as follows:

Note: Check Translatable package for further details.

Manage your nodes/nestedsets

• Inserting Categories
  • Creating categories
  • Making a root from existing category
  • Appending and prepending to the specified parent
  • Inserting before or after specified category
  • Building a tree from array
  • Rebuilding a tree from array
• Retrieving categories
  • Ancestors
  • Descendants
  • Siblings
  • Getting related models from other table
  • Including category depth
  • Default order
    • Shifting a category
  • Constraints
  • Building a tree
    • Building flat tree
    • Getting a subtree
• Deleting categories
• Helper methods
• Checking consistency
  • Fixing tree

Inserting categories

Moving and inserting categories includes several database queries, so transaction is automatically started when category is saved. It is safe to use global transaction if you work with several models.

Another important note is that structural manipulations are deferred until you hit save on model (some methods implicitly call save and return boolean result of the operation).

If model is successfully saved it doesn't mean that category was moved. If your application depends on whether the category has actually changed its position, use hasMoved method:

Creating categories

When you simply create a category, it will be appended to the end of the tree:

In this case the category is considered a root which means that it doesn't have a parent.

Making a root from existing category

The category will be appended to the end of the tree:

Appending and prepending to the specified parent

If you want to make category a child of other category, you can make it last or first child. Suppose that $parent is some existing category, there are few ways to append a category:

And only a couple ways to prepend:

Inserting before or after specified category

You can make $category to be a neighbor of the $neighbor category. Suppose that $neighbor is some existing category, while target category can be fresh. If target category exists, it will be moved to the new position and parent will be changed if it's required.

Building a tree from array

When using static method create on category, it checks whether attributes contains children key. If it does, it creates more categories recursively, as follows:

$category->children now contains a list of created child categories.

Rebuilding a tree from array

You can easily rebuild a tree. This is useful for mass-changing the structure of the tree. Given the $data as an array of categories, you can build the tree as follows:

There is an id specified for category with the title of foo which means that existing category will be filled and saved. If category does not exists ModelNotFoundException is thrown. Also, this category has children specified which is also an array of categories; they will be processed in the same manner and saved as children of category foo.

Category bar has no primary key specified, so it will treated as a new one, and be created.

$delete shows whether to delete categories that are already exists but not present in $data. By default, categories aren't deleted.

Retrieving categories

In some cases we will use an $id variable which is an id of the target category.

Ancestors

Ancestors make a chain of parents to the category. Helpful for displaying breadcrumbs to the current category.

Descendants

Descendants are all categories in a sub tree, i.e. children of category, children of children, etc.

Descendants can be eagerly loaded:

Siblings

Siblings are categories that have same parent.

To get only next siblings:

To get previous siblings:

Getting related models from other table

Imagine that each category has many products. I.e. HasMany relationship is established. How can you get all products of $category and every its descendant? Easy!

Now imagine that each category has many posts. I.e. morphToMany relationship is established this time. How can you get all posts of $category and every its descendant? Is that even possible?! Sure!

Including category depth

If you need to know at which level the category is:

Root category will be at level 0. Children of root categories will have a level of 1, etc. To get categories of specified level, you can apply having constraint:

Default order

Each category has it's own unique _lft value that determines its position in the tree. If you want category to be ordered by this value, you can use defaultOrder method on the query builder:

You can get categories in reversed order:

Shifting a category

To shift category up or down inside parent to affect default order:

The result of the operation is boolean value of whether the category has changed its position.

Constraints

Various constraints that can be applied to the query builder:

• whereIsRoot() to get only root categories;
• whereIsAfter($id) to get every category (not just siblings) that are after a category with specified id;
• whereIsBefore($id) to get every category that is before a category with specified id.

Descendants constraints:

Ancestor constraints:

$category can be either a primary key of the model or model instance.

Building a tree

After getting a set of categories, you can convert it to tree. For example:

This will fill parent and children relationships on every category in the set and you can render a tree using recursive algorithm:

This will output something like this:

Building flat tree

Also, you can build a flat tree: a list of categories where child categories are immediately after parent category. This is helpful when you get categories with custom order (i.e. alphabetically) and don't want to use recursion to iterate over your categories.

Getting a subtree

Sometimes you don't need whole tree to be loaded and just some subtree of specific category:

Now $tree contains children of $root category.

If you don't need $root category itself, do following instead:

Deleting categories

To delete a category:

IMPORTANT! Any descendant that category has will also be deleted!

IMPORTANT! Categories are required to be deleted as models, don't try do delete them using a query like so:

That will break the tree!

Helper methods

Checking consistency

You can check whether a tree is broken (i.e. has some structural errors):

Tree error statistics will return an array with following keys:

• oddness -- the number of categories that have wrong set of lft and rgt values
• duplicates -- the number of categories that have same lft or rgt values
• wrong_parent -- the number of categories that have invalid parent_id value that doesn't correspond to lft and rgt values
• missing_parent -- the number of categories that have parent_id pointing to category that doesn't exists

Fixing tree

Category tree can now be fixed if broken. Using inheritance info from parent_id column, proper _lft and _rgt values are set for every category.

Note: Check Nested Sets package for further details.

Changelog

Refer to the Changelog for a full history of the project.

Support

The following support channels are available at your fingertips:

• Chat on Slack
• Help on Email
• Follow on Twitter

Contributing & Protocols

Thank you for considering contributing to this project! The contribution guide can be found in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests are very welcome.

• Versioning
• Pull Requests
• Coding Standards
• Feature Requests
• Git Flow

Security Vulnerabilities

We want to ensure that this package is secure for everyone. If you've discovered a security vulnerability in this package, we appreciate your help in disclosing it to us in a responsible manner.

Publicly disclosing a vulnerability can put the entire community at risk. If you've discovered a security concern, please email us at [email protected] our highest priority, and work to address any issues that arise as quickly as possible.

After a security vulnerability has been corrected, a security hotfix release will be deployed as soon as possible.

About Rinvex

Rinvex is a software solutions startup, specialized in integrated enterprise solutions for SMEs established in Alexandria, Egypt since June 2016. We believe that our drive The Value, The Reach, and The Impact is what differentiates us and unleash the endless possibilities of our philosophy through the power of software. We like to call it Innovation At The Speed Of Life. That’s how we do our share of advancing humanity.

License

This software is released under The MIT License (MIT).

(c) 2016-2022 Rinvex LLC, Some rights reserved.