This package targets a very specific need, which is moving long and storage-expensive JSON fields out of the main database to external storage systems, without sacrificing the simplicity and the comfort of Eloquent models.

It has some limitations, though:

• It works only with Eloquent Models with numeric PKs
• It does not work with relationships. You cannot use it to persist JSON fields in pivot tables, unless you define a custom Model for them.
• You will have to set your JSON fields as nullable

This package requires Laravel 5.5 or higher, PHP 7.0 or higher.

The package can be installed via composer:

composer require mauricius/laravel-synchronized-fields

The package will automatically register itself.

You may publish the configuration file, which will be located at config/synchronized-fields.php, using the following command

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Mauricius\SynchronizedFields\SynchronizedFieldsServiceProvider"

If you wish to disable the package entirely, you may set the enabled key in config/synchronized-fields.php to false.

You can set the storage driver that will be used to store JSON fields using the driver key in config/synchronized-fields.php. Available values are:

• filesystem (default)
• dynamo
• database

The filesystem driver stores JSON fields in one of the Laravel filesystems defined in config/filesystem.php configuration file. You can set the name of the disk instance in the filesystem.disk key. In order to simplify management files are splitted between multiple folders, so you may define how many files per folder you want to store using the files_per_folder key.

Note: make sure to not change this value once you started using this package.

The dynamo driver stores fields in AWS DynamoDB. You need to fill all the required settings in order to connect to the DynamoDB instance.

Note: you need to create the tables yourself.

The database driver lets you specify an existing database connection from the list of Laravel connections defined in the database.php configuration file. For example you can store fields in a SQLite Database or in a different MySQL database.

Note: you will have to create tables yourself. Just make sure that tables matches the original structure, except of course for the fields that you don't want to synchronize.

If you just want to store a copy of each JSON field, instead of removing it from the original source you need to set the replicate key to true.

Simply use the FieldSynchronizer trait in the models that you want to synchronize and set the static property for the fields that you want to synchronize.

use Mauricius\SynchronizedFields\Traits\SynchronizedFields;

class Post extends Model
{
    use SynchronizedFields;

    /**
     * The attributes that should be synchronized.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected static $synchronizedFields = [
        'metadata'
    ];
}

And then use it like this:

$post = new Post();
$post->title = ...

$post->metadata = [
    'key' => 'value'
    ...
];

$post->save();

The metadata field will be synchronized behind the scenes after saving the model.

The same works when retrieving the model:

$post = Post::find(1);

// if $post->metadata is null in the DB
// the value will be fetched from the storage

dump($post->metadata);

// [
//     'key' => 'value'
//     ...
// ];

If you want to ignore synchronized fields when using the model you can use the withoutSynchronizedFields method.

$post = Post::withoutSynchronizedFields(function () {
    return Post::find(1);
});

If you want instead to ignore only specific synchronized fields when using the model you can use the ignoringSynchronizedFields method.

$post = Post::ignoringSynchronizedFields(['metadata'], function () {
    return Post::find(1);
});

You might want to disable entirely the package when testing your application. You can do this by setting the SYNCHRONIZED_FIELDS_ENABLED env variable to false. For example in phpunit.xml

<php>
    <env name="SYNCHRONIZED_FIELDS_ENABLED" value="false"/>
</php>

Please see CHANGELOG for more information what has changed recently.

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

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