Richard Bagshaw

Associating a Factory with a Model

Last week saw another minor release of the framework, one feature that stood out to me was small but quite valuable.

Here is an example from the [pull request by Christopher Arter

<?php

namespace App\Domain\Models\Comment;

use Database\Factories\CommentFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Attributes\UseFactory;

#[UseFactory(CommentFactory::class)]
class Comment extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;
    // ...
}

Usually, when we use the HasFactory trait on a model, it will use conventions to determine the associated factory.

It will search the Database\Factories namespace that has a class name matching the model name and suffixed with Factory

In some cases, a project may not be structured in a conventional way, meaning that we would have to add a newFactory() method to a model and return an instance of the models corresponding factory.

<?php

namespace App\Domain\Models\Comment;

use Database\Factories\CommentFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Attributes\UseFactory;

class Comment extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;

	protected static function newFactory()
	{
	    return CommentFactory::new();
	}
    // ...
}

The new attribute is really handy as a replacement for this method on the model, we can now just add the attribute to the top of the class.

<?php

#[UseFactory(CommentFactory::class)]

A small but pretty nice change, I imagine we will be seeing quite a few of these types of improvements over the next few months.