Laravel Eloquent: any way to update DB with dynamic fields?

Question

I am trying to implement the "Edit Application Settings" feature. After a bit of thinking, my configuration values are stored in the DB with key -> value structure, like this:

id	key	value
1	logo_path	img/logo.png

As you can see, for each setting, there is only a key & value column. I made an App Service provider to cache them forever, and a helper function (config('setting_key')) to get the value, but now I'd like to update it in the most efficient way.

The user interface consists of the <form action="post" ...> and input with a corresponding name, like this: <input name="setting_key_name" ... />. As you can see, the name attribute here has the value of the key column value and the actual value of the input would be the value column value (a bit of confusion here).

First thing that came to my mind, was to make a foreach loop and find & update every row in DB, but IMHO it is very unoptimized way, cause if the page has a form with 10 values, it is 10 SQL queries. But till now, this is what I've done:

$keys = collect($request->except('_token'))->keys()->toArray();

// get all settings if the key name matches the request's input name
$setting = Setting::whereIn('key', $keys)->get();

$logo = self::GENERAL_APP_LOGO; // contant with a key-name (general_application_logo);

if($request->has(self::GENERAL_APP_LOGO) && $request->$logo) {
    // Processing uploaded image here;
    $this->uploadLogo($image, self::LOGO_IMAGE_PATH, $name); // Using an upload trait

    $setting->where('key', $logo)->value = self::LOGO_IMAGE_PATH . $name; // just a try to update the DB this way
}

foreach ($keys as $key) {
    $setting->where('key', $key)->value = $request->$key; // putting all request's input values to corresponding key
}

$setting->save(); // saving the DB.

As you can see, this won't work and will throw an Exception, like Call to undefined method ...\Eloquent\Builder::save(). I tried the same code with an update, but the difficult part here is to update it multiple times (since the if section should have the update as well, for the logo), as well as binding the key to value.

So, a little bit of your help would be appreciated - what the logic should be here? How can I update a DB rows with corresponding column's value? I mean - like this (update where key = 'general_app_name' set value, 'some_setting_value'), but using the optimized and clear way?

Working solution

As @miken32 stated in his answer, I used hid version of code, but with slight changes:

// Changed the $request->settings->keys() to PHP native method array_keys():
$settings = Settings::whereIn('key', array_keys($request->settings))->get()->groupBy('id');
// Also, here I changed the `whereIn('id', ...)` to `whereIn('key', ...)`, since it was my primary index.

foreach ($request->settings as $k=>$v) {
  if ($k === self::GENERAL_APP_LOGO_ID) {
    // not sure about this one, but I think this is
    // how you'd access a file input in an array
    $image = $request->file('settings')[$k];
    $this->uploadLogo($image, self::LOGO_IMAGE_PATH, $name);
    $v = self::LOGO_IMAGE_PATH . $name;
  }
  // take the Setting object out of the list we pulled
  // Here I added the ->first() to get the first element from the retrieved collection;
  $setting = $settings->get($k)->first();
  $setting->value = $v;
  $setting->save();
}

Since I was fetching the configuration values via helper, that only returns the value of the current key (and no id column), I changed the id to key and made the key as my PK in a model. Works like a charm!

Answer 1

With each setting in a separate row, there's no way to avoid multiple database queries – one to get the current values for all settings, and other to update each one. Looking up items by primary key is more efficient, so I'd recommend putting the contents of the id column in your blade view, like this:

<label for="setting_{{$setting->id}}">{{$setting->key}}</label>
<input name="settings[{{$setting->id}}]" id="setting_{{$setting->id}}" value="{{$setting->value}}"/>

Now in your controller, $request->settings will be an array you can loop through. You can continue treating your file upload separately, but now you've got the id column to look up, so change your constant to that.

$settings = Settings::whereIn('id', $request->settings->keys())->get()->groupBy('id');

foreach ($request->settings as $k=>$v) {
    if ($k === self::GENERAL_APP_LOGO_ID) {
        // not sure about this one, but I think this is
        // how you'd access a file input in an array
        $image = $request->file('settings')[$k];
        $this->uploadLogo($image, self::LOGO_IMAGE_PATH, $name);
        $v = self::LOGO_IMAGE_PATH . $name;
    }
    // take the Setting object out of the list we pulled
    $setting = $settings->get($k);
    $setting->value = $v;
    $setting->save();
}

Note that Laravel does offer methods to bulk-update multiple models at once, but they are doing separate queries to the database in the background. IIRC, the save() method doesn't do anything if the value hasn't changed, which will spare you some hits.

Answer 2

You could try creating a text field, or a json field if your database supports it, and storing all of your settings as a JSON string in that field.

id	settings
1	{ "logo_path" : "img/logo.png", "foo" : "bar", "thing_count" : 17 }
2	{ "logo_path" : "img/logo2.png", "foo" : "baz", "thing_count" : 4 }

In your Laravel model, you can cast it as an array

protected $casts = ["settings" => "array"];

and then use it from the model

echo $theModel->settings['logo'];
echo $theModel->settings['foo'];

or you can cast it as a fully fledged object if you need to using value object casting.

One gotcha that can be confusing for people is the setting of the values in the array to update it. This will not work:

$theModel->settings['foo'] = "boz";

The reason is due to the way the Laravel mutators work. Instead, you make a value copy of the settings, change that, and reassign it to the model:

$settings = $theModel->settings;
$settings['foo'] = "boz";
$theModel->settings = $settings;

This approach has the capacity to infinitely expandable in the future as you just add new keys to your json. Be sure to do checks on the settings array to ensure fields you are looking for are set (which is why value objects can be very handy to do validation).

It also solves your database query problem - it's only ever one.

Answer 3

You don't need to put

$setting->where('key', $logo)->value = ...;

Just call

$setting->where('key', $logo)->update($request->toArray());

$setting->save(); called when you instantiated setting class like :

$setting = new Setting();

Or

$setting = Setting::whereIn('key', $keys)->get()->first();

Then

$setting->val = ...;
$setting->save(); // then it work's