Lastus

Easy status addition and management for your Eloquent models in Laravel.

What is lastus/status?

Consider you are building a forum app, you would typically have a User model/class. A User can be in different states or have different statuses at different points in time. For example when a user first registers for the forum you may want his/her status to be unverified indicating that the user have not verified his/her email. When the user verifies his/her email, he/she may become active. If the user violates one or more of the forum rules, he/she may become suspended, and so on.

Lastus package for Laravel 5 aims to handle all of this for you automatically, with minimal configuration.

• Install the package via Composer:

  $ composer require nzesalem/lastus

  The package will automatically register itself with Laravel 5.5 and later.

Database migrations

Your database tables should have a status column defined as the tinyInteger type. Lastus automatically adds this column to your users table (if it doesn't already exist) when you run the php artisan migrate command after adding Lastus to your project.

You should manually generate migrations for other of your tables as needed. Below is an example of how you would add the status column to a posts table.

First run:

$ php artisan make:migration add_status_field_to_posts_table --table=posts

Then edit the generated migration file like so (usually located at database/migrations):

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class AddStatusFieldToPostsTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
            //...
            $table->tinyInteger('status')->default(0);
        });
        
        //...
    }
}

And finally run:

$ php artisan migrate

Updating your Eloquent Models

Your models should use the LastusTrait and define a STATUSES array constant.

The keys of the STATUSES array should be in all caps and multiple words should be separated with underscore. Ideally it should follow the same naming rules and convention as PHP constants.

The values of the STATUSES array can be any number within the TINYINT range.

use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
use Nzesalem\Lastus\Traits\LastusTrait;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use LastusTrait;

    // Key value pair of the statuses you want your model to have
    const STATUSES = [
        'UNVERIFIED' => 0,
        'ACTIVE' => 1,
        'SUSPENDED' => 2,
        'BLOCKED' => 3,
        'PENDING_APPROVAL' => 7,
    ];

    //...
}

And that's it ...

Usage

When saving models, just set its status property to one of the keys you have defined above, but in all lower case, multiple words should be separated by a hyphen. E.g PENDING_APPROVAL becomes pending-approval. This is the format you will use most of the time when working with statuses.

$user = User::create([
    'name' => 'Salem Nzeukwu',
    'email' => '[email protected]',
    'password' => bcrypt('secret'),
    'status' => 'active', // This will be saved as '1' in the database
]);

Retrieving a model status:

echo $user->status; // This prints 'active'

// Sometime later
$user->status = 'pending-approval';
$user->save();

echo $user->status; // This now prints 'pending-approval'

You can get the status code whenever you need it. For example, status key strings will not work if you try to perform raw queries with them. So, in those cases you need the status codes instead:

$now = Carbon::now();

// Raw insert query
DB::table('users')->insert([
    'name' => 'Firstname Lastname',
    'email' => '[email protected]',
    'password' => bcrypt('secret'),
    'created_at' => $now,
    'updated_at' => $now,
    // Get the status code.
    'status' => User::getStatusCode('suspended'),
]);
// Raw select query
$user = User::whereRaw('status = ' . User::getStatusCode('suspended'))->first();

$user->status == 'suspended' // true

Getting all the defined statuses for a given model is also easy as the snippet below. We get all the defined statuses for the User model and display them in a select element:

<select id="status" class="form-control" name="status" required>
    <option>Select a status</option>
    @foreach (App\User::statuses() as $status)
    <option value="{{ $status }}">{{ ucfirst($status) }}</option>
    @endforeach
</select>

Or you can use the Lastus facade:

print_r(Lastus::statuses(App\User::class));

Blade templates

You can use the @status() blade directive to control the visibility of elements based on the status of the currently logged in user:

@status('active')
    <p>This is only visible to users with an 'active' status.</p>
@endstatus

Middleware

You can use a middleware to filter routes and route groups by status:

Route::group(['prefix' => 'dashboard', 'middleware' => ['status:active']], function() {
    Route::get('/', 'DashboardController@index');
});

License

Lastus is released under the MIT License.