Any awesome Laravel application greatly depends on Model relations. How they work, what are the magical methods behind them? Explained lucidly with examples.

You will learn all Model relations and how you can use them to build a complicated web application.

Apparently, this contents management application does not look very complicated, however, the relations are quite tangled and we will try to understand these relations through Laravel’s Model relations and Eloquent ORM; at the end, we will also learn how resourceful controllers play vital roles in such model relations.

How an article is related to a particular user and how from the article table we can fetch the data of that particular user or writer? An article uses many tags, but how we can access those tags from that article itself? An article may have many comments. Who has written those comments? Of course users. And these users have their own profiles which tell us about them, including name, email, city, and a short biography. Each profile page may have multiple comments written by other users about that profile-holder user. So we have comments table for both – articles and profiles. Can we use one single comment table to serve them both? Yes, we can do! A polymorphic relationship allows us to do that.

These questions are all very tricky, however, laravel model relations, Eloquent ORM, and resourceful controllers has solved these problems quite easily. As we progress we will learn one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, has-many-through, and polymorphic relationships with concrete examples. By the way, we will also learn some major tricks of Laravel (like resource controller and views) that makes your development experience more pleasant.

Finally, what we will see in this application? A user have many articles. When you open the application, you will find the series of article titles. Each title will show who is the writer of it. If you click on each title, you can read the full article. If you click on the user name, you will see the user’s profile and all the articles he/she has written. The same rule is applied for the tags. Each tag may belong to many articles. Again any article may belong to many tags. So each article shows many tags. In the user profile we will see which tags he/she has used often and so on. In addition to that, we have comments on both pages, with a link to the users who have written them.

All together, it’s an interconnected contents management application that handles many complex queries effortlessly.