Different types of tags/categories for a model

@zefex It sounds like you have three models, then: an Ad, a tag type, and tags.

Dunno that it's really necessary, but yeah there is laravel-categories .. and a few others, but this appears to be the most popular, and was last updated today.

I think you could probably get by with your tags/categories having a 'type' flag, assuming you'll have a (even if large) limited number of types, in your example you have services and payment types, so lets go with that...

Your tags could either belongTo a parent Type as @martinbean is suggesting, or you could just as easily use an enum or a string value, especially if the number of types will be limited.

Then for ease you'd probably want your ads to have multiple relationships for the various types, ie:

class Ad extends Model {
  public function services() {
    return $this->belongsToMany(Tag::class)
                ->where('type', 'service')
  }

  public function paymentMethods() {
    return $this->belongsToMany(Tag::class)
                ->where('type', 'payment_method')
  }
}

Or, it may make sense to just go ahead and keep payment_methods and services totally separated as their own models. That's probably the route I'd go just based on the limited details you've provided as it's likely that payment_methods will have other stuff associated with them, and likewise, perhaps, will services. Those strike me more as different types of entity than simple tags.

@willvincent I found a library really similar to what you mentioned, like tags with types, it also supports translations, sorting and slugs: https://github.com/spatie/laravel-tags

It worked like a charm for me, thank you

Good choice, didn't realize there was a spatie package, that's definitely the way to go if you're using a package, and they have one available.

@willvincent The problem tho I find is that I can't actually validate the tags being added by the user, like for instance, I created a table seed for tags where I add a services type with a few tags, if I list the services tags and the user selects a few and send I have to use syncTagsWithType, the problem is that internally it's using findOrCreate meaning that if the user adds another tag manually it will kinda "hack" the system so I need to validate somehow if the selected tag is actually a tag of type service and exists.

You could override the default syncTagsWithType method and make it do a findOrFail instead.

It lives in the HasTags trait, I'd suggest creating your own HasTags trait that extends the package's trait, and override just that one method, or others if necessary.

Something like this ought to do the job..

use Spatie\Tags\HasTags as BaseHasTags;

trait HasTags
{
    use BaseHasTags;

    /**
     * @param array|\ArrayAccess $tags
     * @param string|null $type
     *
     * @return $this
     */
    public function syncTagsWithType($tags, string $type = null)
    {
        $className = static::getTagClassName();
        $tags = collect($className::findOrFail($tags, $type));
        $this->syncTagIds($tags->pluck('id')->toArray(), $type);
        return $this;
    }
}

There are several other methods in there that use a findOrCreate, you may or may not need/want to override those too.

I was thinking more about a validation level thing, like using exists but I can't actually use exists. For example, if the user selects: electricity, painting, general services, I need to know if they actually exists on the database and has the type of them is services, but I got no idea how to do that.