Laravel get all parents of category

I have categories and subcategories in laravel

namespace App;

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;

class Category extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'categories';

    public function parent()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('AppCategory', 'parent_id');
    }

    public function children()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('AppCategory', 'parent_id');
    }
}

And I can add a new category which belongs to an already created category. Something like “Test -> subcategory of test” and then let’s say I will create “sub-subcategory of test” which belongs to subcategory of test which will look like this: “Test -> subcategory of test -> sub-subcategory of test” And in the view I want to print the parents of the category if it has any. I do it like this:

@if($category->parent)
   <td>{{ $category->parent->name }} <strong>-></strong> {{ $category->name }}</td>
@else
   <td>{{ $category->name }}</td>    
@endif

But this only shows one parent category (“subcategory of test -> sub-subcategori of test”). I want to show all the parents which will look like this: “Test->subcategory of test -> sub-subcategory of test” How can I do that?

Answer

You could define a model accessor on Cateory model that retrieves all parents and puts them into a collection. So in your Category model add the following method:

public function getParentsAttribute()
{
    $parents = collect([]);

    $parent = $this->parent;

    while(!is_null($parent)) {
        $parents->push($parent);
        $parent = $parent->parent;
    }

    return $parents;
}

then in your blade template you can fetch all the parents of a category

@if(count($category->parents))
    <td>{{ $category->parents->implode('-') }} <strong>-></strong> {{ $category->name }}</td>
@else
    <td>{{ $category->name }}</td>
@endif

I see no other solution different from recursively retrieving all the parents and the package suggested by @Ross Wilson in the comments. Take into account that the number of queries will be equal to the number of the parent categories.

Another thing that you could do is setting the parent tree into the DB in the categories table, to save a lot of queries. Add in your categories table a string field like parents_tree and at save/update time set this value with the parent names already concatenated. This is a little dirty because if one of the parents change its name you have to update all the children accordingly. Is up to you to which trade-off you want to succumb.