Looking for a smarter way to sync and order entries in Laravel/Eloquent pivot table

Question

In my Laravel 5.1 app, I have classes Page (models a webpage) and Media (models an image). A Page contains a collection of Media objects and this relationship is maintained in a "media_page" pivot table. The pivot table has columns for page_id, media_id and sort_order.

A utility form on the site allows an Admin to manually associate one or more Media items to a Page and specify the order in which the Media items render in the view. When the form submits, the Controller receives a sorted list of media ids. The association is saved in the Controller store() and update() methods as follows:

[STORE] $page->media()->attach($mediaIds);

[UPDATE] $page->media()->sync($mediaIds);

This works fine but doesn't allow me to save the sort_order specified in the mediaIds request param. As such, Media items are always returned to the view in the order in which they appear in the database, regardless of how the Admin manually ordered them. I know how to attach extra data for the pivot table when saving a single record, but don't know how to do this (or if it's even possible) when passing an array to attach() or sync(), as shown above.

The only ways I can see to do it are:

• loop over the array, calling attach() once for each entry and passing along the current counter index as sort_order.

• first detach() all associations and then pass mediaIds array to attach() or sync(). A side benefit would be that it eliminates the need for a sort_order column at all.

I'm hoping there is an easier solution that requires fewer trips to the database. Or am I just overthinking it and, in reality, doing the loop myself is really no different than letting Laravel do it further down the line when it receives the array?

Answer 1

You can add data to the pivot table while attaching or syncing, like so:

$mediaIds = [
    1 => ['sort_order' => 'order_for_1'],
    3 => ['sort_order' => 'order_for_3']
];

//[STORE]
$page->media()->attach($mediaIds;

//[UPDATE]
$page->media()->sync($mediaIds);