BrekiTomasson\LaravelModelFinder

A simple trait that makes building your own custom Laravel Model Searches a lot easier and safer. It ensures that your search criteria match one, and only one, result in the table being searched, allowing you to comfortably type-hint your methods by ensuring that the result of a query will never be null or a Collection, but always an instance of the specific Model you're querying. It does this by searching for a row that uniquely contains the data you're looking for in one of the named columns. That's the selling point of this package; it will only return a result if that result is the only result for your query.

This means that instead of writing Car::where('license_plate', 'MTU 83779')->firstOrFail() and then worrying about whether your license_plate column is unique or not, you can write CarFinder::find('MTU 83779'), and it will return a result only if it is the only row in the entire table that has that particular value. And since you can define multiple columns for it to search through, CarFinder::find('1HGBH41JXMN109186') might return a result if you have a vim_number column in your Car model.

To speed things up, the package also leverages Laravel's Cache implementation, storing all results in the cache for 24 hours, meaning only the first UserFinder::find('[email protected]') call of the day will be hitting your database, with the rest being served from cache.

Installation

At the moment, no configuration files are required, although this may be introduced in future versions. To use this library, all you need to do is require the package in the root directory of your Laravel project:

composer require brekitomasson/laravel-model-finder

Usage

This package is used by adding one of the two traits that it offers to a class. There are two traits because there are two main ways to use this package; either by (1) building your own custom Finder-classes or by (2) adding unique search-functionality to your Models.

I recommend the first method, as it allows for a cleaner separation of concerns and is more feature-complete, but I will describe both ways below and allow you to decide for yourself. For both examples, I will be showing the functionality by using a hypothetical Country model, but the system works for absolutely any Laravel-powered model. For the sake of argument, assume an entry in the Country model looks like this:

{
  "id": 213,
  "alpha2": "KR",
  "alpha3": "KOR",
  "name": "The Republic of Korea",
  "numeric": 410,
  "short_name": "South Korea"
}

Method 1: Building Your Own Finder-Class

Let's create a new CountryFinder in the App\Tools namespace. It doesn't need to extend or implement any other classes, but it needs to use the CanFindModelEntries trait. Depending on your IDE, this will then inform you that you have a method stub for the static method find that needs to be implemented, so let's do that.

Now, since PHP doesn't natively support abstract keywords in their Traits (Seriously, PHP; what's up with that?), we have to implement the next two things manually. They are the protected static array $queryKeys and the protected static Model|string $queryModel. You populate these with:

• protected static array $queryKeys: An array containing the list of attributes to be searched, and
• protected static Model|string $queryModel: the FQN (including ::class) of the Model being searched.

At this point, the file should look something like this:

<?php

declare(strict_types = 1);

namespace App\Tools;

use BrekiTomasson\LaravelModelFinder\CanFindModelEntries;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class CountryFinder
{
    use CanFindModelEntries;
    
    protected static array $queryKeys = [
        'alpha2',
        'alpha3',
        'name',
        'short_name',
    ];

    protected static Model|string $queryModel = \App\Models\World\Country::class;

    public static function find(mixed $value) : Model
    {
        // TODO: Implement find() method.
    }
}

The next step is to implement the find(mixed $value) method. The way you implement the find(mixed $value) is fairly standardized, but has been left to the user so that any customization or tweaking can be done here. A fairly standard implementation - with inline comments for added clarification - will look something like the code below, which you can copy/paste into your own implementation. Note that I've changed the return type of the find() method from the default Model to Country here, so that my IDE will correctly understand which methods and attributes are available on the returned object rather than suggesting the methods and attributes on the base Model class.

public static function find(mixed $value) : Country
{
    // First, we 'clean' the value by removing any trailing or leading spaces, squishing extra spaces down to
    // single spaces, casting the result to string, etc.
    $value_object = new \BrekiTomasson\LaravelModelFinder\DataObjects\ValueObject($value);
    
    // Then, we generate the Cache Helper using the Value Object we've just generated. This will allow us to query
    // the cache for the search criteria you've entered.
    $cache = self::getCacheHelper($value_object);

    // If we've already got the results for this search in our cache, we can return it as is.
    if ($cache->exists()) {
        return $cache->get();
    }

    // Perform the search and store the result in $result. This will throw a ModelNotFoundException if no result is
    // found or a MultipleRecordsFoundException if two or more results are found.
    $result = self::searchInModel($value_object);

    // Return $result, ensuring we also store it in the cache for future use.
    return $cache->put($result);
}

Once you've implemented the find method with the relevant contents, you should be able to CountryFinder::find('sweden'), and it will return an entry from your Country Model where the string 'sweden' is found in one of the four columns you named in the $queryKeys array. You can also call methods or reference attributes directly from the returned object. Getting the official name of Iceland, for example, would be as easy as calling something like CountryFinder::find('is')->name, as 'is' is a unique identifier for the alpha2 property.

Method 2: Powering Up Your Models

Please read through Method 1 first to understand a little more about how this package works under the hood, as that will help you understand this method of implementation better.

This way of implementing the package does not require you to create an entirely new class. Instead, all you need to do is use CanBeSoleSearched inside of the Model you wish to be searchable and define the required attributes, same as above. Unfortunately, you still need to define the $queryModel property as there is no good way for a static method to automatically populate this field from within a Trait, although this is something that I'm trying to figure out a good way to do for a future release.

After that is done, you should be able to call Country::findSole('taiwan'), for example, and it will scan the columns defined in $queryKeys and return a single result, if available. You can, of course, define your own findSole method that overwrites the one defined in the trait, but this is usually not necessary.

Digging Deeper

This package is very much "what you see is what you get", with few bells and whistles under the hood. That said, there are two methods available that are not part of normal operations and which allow you to clear the caches defined by this package.

Calling the static method clearClassCache() on any class that uses either the CanFindModelEntries or the CanBeSoleSearched traits will clear all caches related to that particular class. Calling the static method clearModelFinderCache() on any class that uses either the CanFindModelEntries or the CanBeSoleSearched will clear all caches related to all models that are searched by this package. However, as the cache is never updated unless a single model is found, calling these methods is usually not required, but they exist in case you have a need for them.

Advanced Usage

Imagine you have a Country model that doesn't have all the extra fields in the examples above, but you still want to be able to find countries based on a number of different criteria. What you could do is create a CountryName model containing just a (unique) name and a country_id, then set the CountryName Model to BelongTo the Country Model.

This will allow you to create a CountryFinder class that uses the CountryName Model and just replace the final line, return $cache->put($result) with something more like return $cache->put($result->country). This way, if CountryName contains entries for 'America', 'USA', 'US', 'United States of America', 'The States' and 'US of A', you will be able to CountryFinder::find('usa') and it will return the related Country Model despite everything operating on the CountryName Model under the hood.

Potential Problems

Due to the way this package works, it should work "out of the box" for about 99% of your use cases (but don't quote me on that). However, there are a couple of scenarios where the package may not work as intended. If you're having any problems with the package, please check TROUBLESHOOTING.md before opening an issue, as it is quite likely that your question is answered there.

Future Development / Backlog

Here are a number of features/functionality that I want to implement in this package. Pull Requests are always welcome, of course.

• Create a model-finder.php configuration file that can be published, allowing the user to set a number of defaults, such as whether to use caching or not, how long results should be stored in the cache, as well as a number of tweaks and adjustments to how the ValueObject is filtered.
• Update the way the cache key is generated to use the database table's name rather than the Model's class name.
• Explore the need to create a ServiceProvider for the package. At the moment, I can't think of any reason to include anything like that, but maybe there is value in providing some kind of Dependency Injectable ModelFinder object of some sort? Not sure about this one...
• Some "internal" code (ValueObject and DataObject, for example) feels like it could be cleaned up.
• Some kind of Laravel-native hooks, Observers and/or events to clear the cache when models are updated is probably in order, but I don't want to clear the entire cache for any given model just because one row has been added or removed. This will have to be explored.
• Explore compatibility with Laravel v8.x - am I doing anything in this package that is exclusive to v9.x, or can I add support for v8.x without rewriting anything?
• Reduce the reliance on self:: calls and static properties by implementing a singleton object behind the scenes?
• Write tests that make sense for this package.
• Test this package with other database providers and "pseudo-databases" like Sushi to ensure it works as intended.

Copyright, License and Permissions

This package is released under the MIT license. See the LICENSE for more details.