Let’s discuss more about Polymorphism in Laravel in this article. Bobcares, as a part of our Laravel Support Services offers solutions to every query that comes our way.

What is meant by Polymorphism in Laravel?

The type of database relationship where a model can belong to multiple other models on a single association is known as Polymorphism. By doing this, a model can interact with other models in a flexible way without having to explicitly define a relationship for each connected model.

This feature is very helpful in situations where we need to have a model that should be linked with multiple other models. For instance, for a Social Media system, we have a “Comment” model. This should also belong to other models such as Story, Post, Video, Pictures, etc. With this, we can also handle all of them with a single association rather than creating separate commentable relationships for each model.

Defining Polymorphism in Laravel

In order to define the feature on Laravel, we need to perform the following steps:

1. Firstly, include two columns to the schema that holds the relationship. Considering the above example, it will be commentable_id (unsigned big integer) and commentable_type (string).

2. Then, define the relationship’s inverse using the morphTo() in the Comment. The name of the polymorphic relationship and the columns that were used to identify the related model are specified by this method.

3. Now, use the morphMany() or morphOne() to define the forward relationship in the models that can be commented on (e.g., Post, Video, Image). The model to which the polymorphic relationship is related and its name are specified here.

4. Now, we can call this relationship method (comments() in this example) on the related model instance to retrieve the comments associated with a particular model. For instance,

This will return all the comments linked with the Post.

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Conclusion

We can establish adaptable and reusable relationships between models in Laravel by using polymorphic relationships, which enable them to be connected to various kinds of models in the application.