Moving Customers through Pipeline Stages

Currently, we have Customers and Pipeline Stages in our system. Still, there is no easy way to move our Customers within the Pipeline while saving its history. Let's fix that by adding a table Action:

In this lesson, we will do the following:

• Create a CustomerPipelineStage Model to save the history of the Customer's Pipeline Stage changes and any comments added.
• Add a custom Table Action to move customers to other pipeline stages.
• Add creating and updating action Observers to our Customer Model to save the history.

Creating Logs Model and Table

Our CustomerPipelineStage Model will be a simple table with the following fields:

• customer_id - the Customer ID
• pipeline_stage_id (nullable) - the Pipeline Stage ID. It is nullable to allow notes without status change.
• user_id (nullable) - the User who made the change. It is nullable to allow system-triggered changes to be logged.
• notes (nullable, text) - any notes added to the change

Let's create the Migration:

Migration

use App\Models\Customer;
use App\Models\PipelineStage;
use App\Models\User;
 
// ...
 
Schema::create('customer_pipeline_stages', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->foreignIdFor(Customer::class)->constrained();
    $table->foreignIdFor(PipelineStage::class)->nullable()->constrained();
    $table->foreignIdFor(User::class)->nullable()->constrained();
    $table->text('notes')->nullable();
    $table->timestamps();
});

Next, we will create the Model:

app/Models/CustomerPipelineStage.php

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsTo;
 
class CustomerPipelineStage extends Model
{
    protected $fillable = [
        'customer_id',
        'pipeline_stage_id',
        'user_id',
        'notes'
    ];
 
    public function user(): BelongsTo
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(User::class);
    }
 
    public function customer(): BelongsTo
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Customer::class);
    }
 
    public function pipelineStage(): BelongsTo
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(PipelineStage::class);
    }
}

And finally, we will add the relationship to our Customer Model:

app/Models/Customer.php

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany;
 
// ...
 
public function pipelineStageLogs(): HasMany
{
    return $this->hasMany(CustomerPipelineStage::class);
}

That's it. We can run:

php artisan migrate:fresh --seed

And have the Database table ready for our customer logs.

Creating Table Action

Now that we have our Database and Models ready, we can...