README

What it does?

Constella will automatically publish your DB columns as public PHP constants after every successful regular Laravel php artisan migrate execution.

In addition to that, you may also want to follow same logic on Model relations too and have them as constants. You can simply generate them with an artisan command.

Note: This is mostly to be used for your new projects, since it can get quite cumbersome to refactor your current ones to follow that logic.

What this is about?

Wouldn't it be great for your developers, no matter if they are new to the project, or have been there for some time already, to be able to find where a specific DB column or relation is being used on the codebase, super fast?

Think of it, that's extremelly powerful since almost everything is around data.

That means:

• Faster & painless bug fixes
• Faster & painless code refactorings
• New comers can ship faster
• Consistency & enhanced searchability

And in general, more confidence on finding where things are being used in a large (or not) codebase.

Example that describes the problem

Your project is a large SaaS application and your new developer needs to do some refactoring on a column named 'title' on a Project model.

Now the developer must find where this column is being used, probably exploring different files or globally searching on the IDE for things like:

$project->title

where('title')

whereTitle

After finding some on different files, person just wishes that to be all. That simple task was almost already pain in the ass. The larger the codebase, the worse it gets. The developer experience can get better IMO.

A solution to the above problem

You have a policy / coding standard on your codebase and you don't allow developers to use magic strings for DB columns or even relations. Developers should only use regular PHP constants.

The above developer now just searches for

ProjectColumn::TITLE

and immediately finds all the places where title columns is being used in a matter of seconds!

The trick here is to treat it as a strict code policy and see the long term benefits of this.

Specifically

You DON'T using magic string for your columns, for example:

$project->title = 'something'

Project::query()->where('title', ...)

Task::query()->whereRelation('project', 'title', '=' ....)

You FORCE your developers (on code reviews for example) to use constants:

$project->{ProjectColumn::TITLE} = 

$project->setAttribute(ProjectColumn::TITLE, '...')

Project::query()->where(ProjectColumn::TITLE, '...')

Task::query()->whereRelation('project', ProjectColumn::TITLE', '=' ....)

In the beginning that may be a bit weird to type, but you get used to it very fast and the long term benefits for the project really worth it IMO.

Installation & usage

You can install the package via composer:

composer require glioympas/constella

You can publish the config file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Lioy\Constella\ConstellaServiceProvider" --tag="config"

Constella will automatically publish column classes on the same root folder where your models exist.

This will happen after a successful regular migration using:

php artisan migrate (or migrate:rollback)

For first time usage, if you don't have an migration to execute, you can publish them using the following command:

php artisan constella:columns

Also need Model relations constants?

Want to also have model relations as constants too? You can generate them with the following command on first time usage or after each time you add a new relation

to your models:

php artisan constella:relations

Note: To allow Constella locate the relations, your relation functions on Eloquent models should be type-hinted!

Then you can force a policy for your developers to use relations like that:

Task::query()->whereRelation(TaskRelation::PROJECT, ProjectColumn::TITLE, '=', '....)

$task->{TaskRelation::PROJECT}->title

Task::query()->whereHas(TaskRelation::PROJECT, fn() => ... )

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.