Best Practice: Extends vs. One-to-one relationship

Hi - I'm looking for guidance on Eloquent Best Practice for using/avoiding extending models.

Example: three models: Student, Teacher, Parent.

Each is a User and each has common properties: first/last name, address, email, phone.

I've placed these common properties into a Person model.

Address, Email and Phone are separate models and coded as one-to-many or many-to-many relationships.

First_name and Last_name are one-to-one relationships as are the User properties.

Question: Should User->Person->Student, User->Person->Teacher and User->Person->Parent be defined as one-to-one relationships using HasOne()/BelongsTo() methods or simply extended as in traditional OOP structure?

Thanks for your thoughts!

jeffreyvanrossum

5 years ago

Best Answer

Level 9

I would say that inheritance would make sense in this case. And if other attributes are needed for a specific child, you could implement that through a relation to keep the users table clean.

But I'm interested in what others think. Maybe it would depend on how you plan to interact with these entities?

Rretzko

5 years ago

Level 15

Thanks for the response, JeffreyVanRossum! This didn't seem to generate much interest, which leads me to believe that it isn't a hot-topic and likely folks stay with the default one-to-one/many relationships.

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