How to create Eloquent model with relationship?

Question

How to create Eloquent model with relationship?

I have:

Person table

id
firstname
lastname

Employee table

id
person_id
position

I want to do something like this:

Employee::create([
'firstname' => 'Jack',
'lastname' => 'London',
'position' => 'writer'
])

I know, that can create two model and then associate their. But may be there is a way do this more beautiful?

Answer 1

First, you have to create relation in your Person model

class Person extends Model
{
    protected $fillable = ['firstname', 'lastname'];

    public function employee()
    {
        return $this->hasOne('App\Employee');
    }
}

After that in your controller you can do:

$person = Person::create($personData);
$person->employee()->create($employeeData);

As @Alexey Mezenin mentioned you can use:

$person = Person::create(request()->all());
$person->employee()->create(request()->all());

Also inverse would be:

class Employee extends Model
{
    protected $fillable = ['position'];

    public function person()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('App\Person');
    }
}

Answer 2

You still need to create person first, so if you're looking for readable and consize solution, you can do is this:

$data = [
    'firstname' => 'Jack',
    'lastname' => 'London',
    'position' => 'writer'
];

$person = Person::create($data);
$person->employee()->create($data);

Answer 3

I'd suggest you create a static method that creates the instance and related models. Many times you not only create a model, but you may have to populate it with some additional data and having a single createModel() method is a best practice.

In my case:

public static function createCompany($data) : Company {
    $company = new Company($data);
    $company->save();
    $company->settings()->create();
    // TODO Configure settings according to $data

    $company->blog()->create();
    // TODO: Create demo blog post

    // TODO: Create default admin user.
    // TODO: Etc.
}

All these details can be abstracted from the controller, in which I only call:

$company = Company::createCompany($request->all());