Polymorphic relationshoip in Laravel

Question

I'm trying to understand polymorphic relationship in Laravel. I know how it works in principle, but the choice of wording in Laravel is not intuitive in this part. Given the exanple,

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Like extends Model
{
    /**
     * Get all of the owning likeable models.
     */
    public function likeable()
    {
        return $this->morphTo();
    }
}

class Post extends Model
{
    /**
     * Get all of the product's likes.
     */
    public function likes()
    {
        return $this->morphMany('App\Like', 'likeable');
    }
}

class Comment extends Model
{
    /**
     * Get all of the comment's likes.
     */
    public function likes()
    {
        return $this->morphMany('App\Like', 'likeable');
    }
}

How do yo put in plain English sentence morphTo for instance? It is "belongsto"? and morphmany, hasMany? going further,

$post = App\Post::find(1);

foreach ($post->likes as $like) {
    //
}

$likeable = $like->likeable;


morphToMany and morphByMany

How do you describe in plain english?

rosscooper rosscooper · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-20T00:41:10

A polymorphic relationship means an object can have a relationship to more than one type of object. This is determined by two fields in the database rather the typical one foreign key field you would normally see. Using the code you included in your question any type of object extending the Model class can have a relationship with a Like object. So you could have Comments and Posts that can have Likes associated to them. In your likes table you may have rows where 'likable_type' = 'post' and 'likable_id' = 1 or 'likable_type' = 'comment' and 'likable_id' = 4 for example.

Polymorphic relationshoip in Laravel

1 Answers