Managing relationships in Laravel, adhering to the repository pattern

Question

While creating an app in Laravel 4 after reading T. Otwell's book on good design patterns in Laravel I found myself creating repositories for every table on the application.

I ended up with the following table structure:

• Students: id, name
• Courses: id, name, teacher_id
• Teachers: id, name
• Assignments: id, name, course_id
• Scores (acts as a pivot between students and assignments): student_id, assignment_id, scores

I have repository classes with find, create, update and delete methods for all of these tables. Each repository has an Eloquent model which interacts with the database. Relationships are defined in the model per Laravel's documentation: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#relationships.

When creating a new course, all I do is calling the create method on the Course Repository. That course has assignments, so when creating one, I also want to create an entry in the score's table for each student in the course. I do this through the Assignment Repository. This implies the assignment repository communicates with two Eloquent models, with the Assignment and Student model.

My question is: as this app will probably grow in size and more relationships will be introduced, is it good practice to communicate with different Eloquent models in repositories or should this be done using other repositories instead (I mean calling other repositories from the Assignment repository) or should it be done in the Eloquent models all together?

Also, is it good practice to use the scores table as a pivot between assignments and students or should it be done somewhere else?

Answer 1

I am finishing up a large project using Laravel 4 and had to answer all of the questions you are asking right now. After reading all of the available Laravel books over at Leanpub, and tons of Googling, I came up with the following structure.

1. One Eloquent Model class per datable table
2. One Repository class per Eloquent Model
3. A Service class that may communicate between multiple Repository classes.

So let's say I'm building a movie database. I would have at least the following following Eloquent Model classes:

• Movie
• Studio
• Director
• Actor
• Review

A repository class would encapsulate each Eloquent Model class and be responsible for CRUD operations on the database. The repository classes might look like this:

• MovieRepository
• StudioRepository
• DirectorRepository
• ActorRepository
• ReviewRepository

Each repository class would extend a BaseRepository class which implements the following interface:

interface BaseRepositoryInterface
{
    public function errors();

    public function all(array $related = null);

    public function get($id, array $related = null);

    public function getWhere($column, $value, array $related = null);

    public function getRecent($limit, array $related = null);

    public function create(array $data);

    public function update(array $data);

    public function delete($id);

    public function deleteWhere($column, $value);
}

A Service class is used to glue multiple repositories together and contains the real "business logic" of the application. Controllers only communicate with Service classes for Create, Update and Delete actions.

So when I want to create a new Movie record in the database, my MovieController class might have the following methods:

public function __construct(MovieRepositoryInterface $movieRepository, MovieServiceInterface $movieService)
{
    $this->movieRepository = $movieRepository;
    $this->movieService = $movieService;
}

public function postCreate()
{
    if( ! $this->movieService->create(Input::all()))
    {
        return Redirect::back()->withErrors($this->movieService->errors())->withInput();
    }

    // New movie was saved successfully. Do whatever you need to do here.
}

It's up to you to determine how you POST data to your controllers, but let's say the data returned by Input::all() in the postCreate() method looks something like this:

$data = array(
    'movie' => array(
        'title'    => 'Iron Eagle',
        'year'     => '1986',
        'synopsis' => 'When Doug\'s father, an Air Force Pilot, is shot down by MiGs belonging to a radical Middle Eastern state, no one seems able to get him out. Doug finds Chappy, an Air Force Colonel who is intrigued by the idea of sending in two fighters piloted by himself and Doug to rescue Doug\'s father after bombing the MiG base.'
    ),
    'actors' => array(
        0 => 'Louis Gossett Jr.',
        1 => 'Jason Gedrick',
        2 => 'Larry B. Scott'
    ),
    'director' => 'Sidney J. Furie',
    'studio' => 'TriStar Pictures'
)

Since the MovieRepository shouldn't know how to create Actor, Director or Studio records in the database, we'll use our MovieService class, which might look something like this:

public function __construct(MovieRepositoryInterface $movieRepository, ActorRepositoryInterface $actorRepository, DirectorRepositoryInterface $directorRepository, StudioRepositoryInterface $studioRepository)
{
    $this->movieRepository = $movieRepository;
    $this->actorRepository = $actorRepository;
    $this->directorRepository = $directorRepository;
    $this->studioRepository = $studioRepository;
}

public function create(array $input)
{
    $movieData    = $input['movie'];
    $actorsData   = $input['actors'];
    $directorData = $input['director'];
    $studioData   = $input['studio'];

    // In a more complete example you would probably want to implement database transactions and perform input validation using the Laravel Validator class here.

    // Create the new movie record
    $movie = $this->movieRepository->create($movieData);

    // Create the new actor records and associate them with the movie record
    foreach($actors as $actor)
    {
        $actorModel = $this->actorRepository->create($actor);
        $movie->actors()->save($actorModel);
    }

    // Create the director record and associate it with the movie record
    $director = $this->directorRepository->create($directorData);
    $director->movies()->associate($movie);

    // Create the studio record and associate it with the movie record
    $studio = $this->studioRepository->create($studioData);
    $studio->movies()->associate($movie);

    // Assume everything worked. In the real world you'll need to implement checks.
    return true;
}

So what we're left with is a nice, sensible separation of concerns. Repositories are only aware of the Eloquent model they insert and retrieve from the database. Controllers don't care about repositories, they just hand off the data they collect from the user and pass it to the appropriate service. The service doesn't care how the data it receives is saved to the database, it just hands off the relevant data it was given by the controller to the appropriate repositories.