Jun 29, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, eloquent

Customizing additional parameters in FirstOrCreate in Laravel 5.3

This is a series of posts on New Features in Laravel 5.3.

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Warning: This post is over a year old. I don't always update old posts with new information, so some of this information may be out of date.

More Laravel 5.3 goodies! This time, it's an update to the Eloquent firstOrCreate method.

If you've never used it before, you can pass an array of values to firstOrCreate and it will look up whether a record exists with those properties. If so, it'll return that instance; if not, it'll create it and then return the created instance.

Here's an example:

$tag = Tag::firstOrCreate(['slug' => 'matts-favorites']);

This is good. It's very useful. But.

What if the tag with the slug matts-favorites represents a tag with the label Matts favorites?

$tag = Tag::firstOrCreate(['slug' => 'matts-favorites', 'label' => 'Matts Favorites']);

OK, that worked well. But now, imagine this scenario: you want to create a tag with slug of matts-favorites and label of Matt's favorites unless there's already a tag with slug matts-favorites, in which case you just want that tag—even if it doesn't give you the label you want? Check it:

$tag = Tag::firstOrCreate(
    ['slug' => 'matts-favorites'],
    ['label' => "Matt's Favorites"]
);

We've specified that the Tag model should look up a tag where slug is matts-favorites and return it if so. And if not, create a new tag with slug matts-favorites and label Matt's Favorites, and return that. Bam. Beautiful.

Comments? I'm @stauffermatt on Twitter

Tags: laravel • laravel 5.3 • eloquent

This is part of a series of posts on New Features in Laravel 5.3:

Introducing Laravel Echo: An In-Depth Walk-Through

Jun 16, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, echo, websockets
The new $loop variable in Laravel 5.3

Jun 27, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3
Customizing additional parameters in FirstOrCreate in Laravel 5.3

Jun 29, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, eloquent
The new cache() global helper in Laravel 5.3

Jul 6, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3
Advanced operations with Collection::where in Laravel 5.3

Jul 8, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3
New JSON-column where() and update() syntax in Laravel 5.3

Jul 8, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, eloquent
Image dimension validation rules in Laravel 5.3

Jul 25, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3
Customizing pagination templates in Laravel 5.3

Jul 26, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3
Routing changes in Laravel 5.3

Jul 27, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, routing
5.3 feature announcement notes from Laracon

Jul 27, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, laravel scout, laravel passport, mailable
Introducing Laravel Scout

Jul 29, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, laravel scout
Introducing Laravel Passport

Jul 30, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, laravel passport, oauth
Introducing Mailables in Laravel 5.3

Aug 5, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, mail, laravel mailables
Directory structure changes in Laravel 5.3

Aug 8, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3
The new Notification system in Laravel 5.3

Oct 19, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, laravel notifications, notifications
Using Vue in Laravel 5.3, with the Vue bootstrap and sample component

Dec 21, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, vuejs, vueify, authorization
Update to queue workers in Laravel 5.3

Dec 21, 2016 | laravel, laravel 5.3, queues
Defining console commands via closure in Laravel 5.3

Jan 30, 2017 | laravel, laravel 5.3, artisan

Customizing additional parameters in FirstOrCreate in Laravel 5.3

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