How to Inherit Models in Laravel 4

Question

Whereas you have the Models Pessoa and Usuario, and that a Usuario is a Pessoa (Usuario extends Pessoa), or Usuario belongsTo Pessoa and Pessoa hasOne Usuario.

It is possible that the Usuario has the same attributes and methods as Pessoa without doing $usuario->pessoa->metodo, simply making $usuario->metodo?

Answer 1

It doesn’t work that way in Laravel.

Relationships are represented as follows (in your case):

class Usuario extends Eloquent {
    public function belongsTo()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('Usuario');
    }
}

class Pessoa extends Eloquent {
    public function hasOne()
    {
        return $this->hasOne('Usuario');
    }
}

Regarding methods and/or properties, you have access to all of the related object (Eloquent) but referring to the Eloquent/Model.

If you want to do something more specific, you should use the concepts/methodologies related to:

• Addiction Injection (DI)
• Ioc
• S.O.L.I.D

For example, working with Repositories (Repositories/Factories), as almost everything is isolated from the basic structure (mvc), you will have for example "n" repositories with the necessary methods/linked to any class, with this you can access them from any "place".

I believe that by researching the above concepts you will get to where you want.

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Answer 2

Consider that relationship is not the same thing as inheritance, when you define relationship between models, it has nothing to do with inheritance of methods and attributes.

To create inheritance between models, you need to extend them in this way:

class Evento{
     var $table = 'eventos';
}

class Reuniao extends Evento{

}