Seed data with relationship in Laravel

Question

I'm trying to seed my Laravel 5.6 application through faker factory, I went through the link and little bit confused, As I have some basic static data, like for example I've a company model:

class Company extends Model {

    use SoftDeletes, HasDataSearchTable, HasSlug;

    protected $fillable = [
        'name', 'code_link', 'slug', 'establishment', 'parent_id', 'website', 'updates', 'user_id', 'tracked', 'verified', 'active', 'premium', 'status'
    ];

    /**
     * The attributes that should be hidden for arrays.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $hidden = [
        'created_at','updated_at','deleted_at'
    ];

    public function roles()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('Noetic\Plugins\Conxn\Models\Variables\Company\Role', 'company_role_relation', 'company_id', 'role_id')->withTimestamps();
    }
}

And a relational role model:

class Role extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes  , HasDataSearchTable;

    protected $table='company_role';

    protected $fillable = [
        'name', 'parent_id'
    ];

    /**
     * The attributes that should be hidden for arrays.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $hidden = [
        'created_at','updated_at','deleted_at'
    ];

}

and respective database, I'm following the laravel convention, Now I want to seed the data:

I've particular set of roles which I'm seed in manually,

class CompanyRoleSeed extends Seeder
{
    /**
     * Run the database seeds.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function run()
    {
        DB::table('company_role')->insert([
            ['name' => 'Contractor', 'parent_id' => null],
            ['name' => 'Consultant', 'parent_id' => null],
            ['name' => 'Manufacturer', 'parent_id' => null],
            ['name' => 'Miscellaneous', 'parent_id' => null],
            ['name' => 'Owner', 'parent_id' => null],
            ['name' => 'Supplier', 'parent_id' => null],
        ]);

    }
}

For company I want to create factory so I did:

$factory->define(Company::class, function (Faker $faker) {


    return [
        'name' => $faker->company,
        'code_link' => rand(5, 10),
        'slug' => str_slug($faker->company),
        'about' => $faker->paragraphs(),
        'establishment' => $faker->randomElement('2015', '2016', '2017', '2018'),
        'parent_id' => $faker->randomElement(null, '1', '2', '3'),
        'website' => $faker->url,
        'user_id' => $faker->randomElement('1', '2', '3', '4', '5'),
        'updates' => $faker->paragraphs(),
        'tracked' => $faker->boolean,
        'verified' => $faker->boolean,
        'active' => $faker->boolean,
        'premium' => $faker->boolean,
        'status' => $faker->randomElement('saved', 'draft')
    ];
});

And in company seed I'm having:

class CompanySeed extends Seeder
{
    /**
     * Run the database seeds.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function run()
    {
        factory(Company::class, 10)->create()->each(function ($company) {
            $company->roles()->save(); // Don't now how to execute here
        });
    }
}

Help me at place $company->roles()->save(); What should I do over here.

Any guidance or improvisation welcome.

Answer 1

before answering your question you should know that Laravel's documentation explains how to do this.

But in order to save a related Model you first need to create a fake one, or in your case relate a role you have already created. In order to do this you could first create a Role factory using something like this:

$factory->define(App\Role::class, function (Faker $faker) {
    $randomRoleAlreadyCreated = \App\Role::all()->random();
    return [
        'name' => $randomRoleAlreadyCreated->name, 
        'parent_id' => $randomRoleAlreadyCreated->parent_id
    ];
});

As you can see on Role factory I created I pull a random Role since you stated that you already created them manually, so if you choose one randomly then your companys will be related to one of your roles randomly!

Once you have: Roles created in DB, factory of roles, you could relate random roles to a company using the factory to save a random instance.

factory(Company::class, 10)->create()->each(function ($company) {
        $company->roles()->save(factory(App\Role::class)->make()); // Don't now how to do here
    });

Update If you want to save multiple roles for each company you could do this:

factory(Company::class, 10)->create()->each(function ($company) {
        // Instead of 4 you could also create a random number 
        // using $numberOfRolesToAttach = rand($min,$max)
        for($i = 1; $i <= 4; $i++) :
            $company->roles()->save(factory(App\Role::class)->make());
        endfor;

    });

Answer 2

You can query which roles you want to assign to the companies and related them to the created records like this:

class CompanySeed extends Seeder
{
    public function run()
    {
        $contractorRole = Role::whereName('Contractor')->firstOrFail();
        $ownerRole = Role::whereName('Owner')->firstOrFail();

        factory(Company::class, 10)->create()->each(function ($company) use ($contractorRole, $ownerRole) {
            $company->roles()->attach([
                $contractorRole->id,
                $ownerRole->id
            ]);
        });
    }
}

You can check the doc for relating records https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/eloquent-relationships#inserting-and-updating-related-models