laravel models, class names, table names and directory structure best practices

Question

I was wondering what would be the best practice to create the following tables and relations in eloquent / laravel 4.1 models.

• table name magazines with fields id, title
• table name magazine_issues with fields id, title, magazine_id
• table name magazine_issue_articles with fields id, title, body, magazine_issue_id

I need the file/dir structure and the naming of all the Class and files, because I am really confused, for example should I make a directory named magazines and place the Issue.php file there and like so for the articles? And what should be the name of the class itself?

Thank you in advance.

EDIT

I need to have them in subfolders, since that would be much more portable. The question is... will a class with the name magazineIssue (with table name magazine_issues) will be autoloaded and registered from a file called Issue.php in a directory named Magazine/?

I hope you are not as confused as I am :(

Answer 1

If you want to create thinks like Taylor Otwell and 'the core' is trying to teach people do things in Laravel, this is a good start:

Your files could be organized as

├── app
│   ├── Publishing
│   │   ├── Models
│   │   │   ├── Magazine
│   │   │   │   ├── Magazine.php
│   │   │   │   ├── Issue.php
│   │   │   │   ├── Article.php
│   │   ├── BaseModel.php
│   │   ├── Repositories
│   │   │   ├── MagazineRepository.php

Configure a PSR-0 or PSR-4 (better) to autoload your classes:

"psr-0": {
    "Publishing": "app/"
},

Create your namespaced BaseModel:

<?php namespace Publishing\Models

use Eloquent;

class BaseModel extends Eloquent {

}

Create namespaced models, according to your source tree:

<?php namespace Publishing\Models\Magazine

use Publishing\Models\BaseModel;

class Magazine extends BaseModel {

    protected $table = 'magazines';

}

<?php namespace Publishing\Models\Magazine

use Publishing\Models\BaseModel;

class Issue extends BaseModel {

    protected $table = 'magazines_issues';

}

<?php namespace Publishing\Models\Magazine

use Publishing\Models\BaseModel;

class Article extends BaseModel {

    protected $table = 'magazines_issues_articles';

}

You also may want to create a MagazineRepository class, to ease the access to your Magazine Domain:

<?php namespace Publishing\Repositories;

use Publishing\Models\Magazine\Magazine;
use Publishing\Models\Magazine\Issue;
use Publishing\Models\Magazine\Article;

class MagazineRepository implements DataRepositoryInterface {

    private $state;

    public function __construct(
                                    Magazine $magazine,
                                    Issue $issue,
                                    Article $article
                                )
    {
        $this->magazine = $magazine;
        $this->issue = $issue;
        $this->article = $article;
    }

    public function getAll()
    {
        return $this->magazine->all();
    }

    public function findArticle($articleId)
    {
        return $this->article->find($articleId);
    }

    public function getByArticle($articleId)
    {
        return $this->findArticle($articleId)->magazine;
    }

}