Another "hidden gem" of Laravel which is surprisingly rarely used or even known, though it's mentioned in the official Eloquent documentation. Imagine that you have a record, and you need to check if that record already exists in the database - to prevent duplicate, you wouldn't save it second time. There's an elegant way to perform it in Eloquent.
Let's take an example - a user with email [email protected] (real email, feel free to get in touch!).
Typical code would be:
$user = User::where('email', '[email protected]')->first();
if (!$user) {
$user = User::create([
'email' => '[email protected]',
'first_name' => 'Povilas',
'last_name' => 'Korop',
]);
}
Now, what if I told you...
$user = User::firstOrCreate(['email' => '[email protected]'],
['first_name' => 'Povilas', 'last_name' => 'Korop']);
Yup, it's that easy. This sentence performs the same thing - checks the user by email, and if it doesn't exist - creates the record, filling the extra fields with the array in the second parameter.
There's also a method called firstOrNew(). It works almost identically to firstOrCreate(), except that it doesn't actually create a record in DB - it just returns a new Eloquent model object which then you can modify before saving:
$user = User::firstOrNew(['email' => '[email protected]'],
['first_name' => 'Povilas', 'last_name' => 'Korop']);
// ... Some more manipulation on $user
$user->save();
But that's not all! You can do pretty much the same thing for updating the record.
Instead of:
$user = User::where('email', '[email protected]')->first();
if ($user) {
$user->update([
'first_name' => 'Povilas',
'last_name' => 'Korop',
]);
} else {
$user = User::create([
'email' => '[email protected]',
'first_name' => 'Povilas',
'last_name' => 'Korop',
]);
}
Do this:
$user = User::updateOrCreate(['email' => '[email protected]'],
['first_name' => 'Povilas', 'last_name' => 'Korop']);
Same logic of parameters here - Laravel will check for email field, and if it finds the record, it will get updated with first_name and last_name, otherwise new entry will be created with all those three fields.
Some more info and a different example - in the official Eloquent documentation.
