A simple way to associate Questions and Answers to Eloquent models using Laravel 5.2+

Add this to your composer.json:

"require": {
    "metricloop/interrogator": "0.1.*",
},

Note: Since this is a pre-1.0 release, I would leave it as 0.1.* because the package is young and might go in different directions with unforeseen BCs.

And run composer update or composer install. Or do composer require metricloop/interrogator.

Then add this to your config/app.php providers array:

providers = [
    MetricLoop\Interrogator\InterrogatorServiceProvider::class,
]

The Interrogator Facade will be installed automatically within the Service Provider.

Do this. php artisan vendor:publish --provider="MetricLoop\Interrogator\InterrogatorServiceProvider"

It'll publish the config/interrogator.php file. More importantly, it will copy the migrations file into your migrations directory.

Next, you need to run the migrations. php artisan migrate

Next, add the GetsInterrogated trait to whichever Models you want to have Q&A support. This will add the functions and relationships to make it work. You also need to add each Model to the config/interrogator.php file, like so:

'classes' => [
    'user' => [
        'name' => 'User',
        'class' => 'App\User'
    ],
],

At some point you'll need to do composer dump-autoload to make sure everything sticks.

Here's how it works. Every Question belongs to a Group which belongs to a Section. Each Section is associated to a namespaced class name of the corresponding Eloquent model.

Let's say you wanted to create a Q&A to collect some information on your Users. You're interested in their date of birth.

First, let's create a Section called Overview and a Group called Personal. Then, we'll create the Date of Birth Question.

$section  = Interrogator::createSection('Overview', [], 'App\User');
$group    = Interrogator::createGroup('Personal', $section);
$question = Interrogator::createQuestion('Date of Birth', 'date_time', $group);

Now all you have to do is call the answerQuestion() on the User model and give it the value, like so:

$user->answerQuestion($question, '1989-09-10');

The GetsInterrogated trait will determine if you're creating a new Answer, or if you're updating an existing Answer. Also note that $question in this function call can be either the full Question object, the id, or the slug of the question.

Now you want to retrieve the Answer and do something with it, yeah? Display it, compare it against something, whatever. That's super easy, too.

$answer = $user->getAnswerFromQuestion($question);

Again, $question can be the full Question object, the id, or the unique slug.

So you've interrogated someone (or something!) and now you want to recall those answers. You know the general answer, but you can't remember who said it. Enter the Detective.

If you know beyond a shadow of a doubt the exact answer you're looking for, do this:

$results = Interrogator::searchExact('foo');

You could also do this if you know the fully qualified class_name or the question_ids of what you're searching for.

$results = Interrogator::searchExact('foo', 'App\User');
$results = Interrogator::searchExact('foo', null, [1,2,3]);
$results = Interrogator::searchExact('foo', 'App\User', [1,2,3]);

This is more likely what you'll be doing:

$results = Interrogator::search('foo');
$results = Interrogator::search('foo', 'App\User');
$results = Interrogator::search('foo', 'App\User', [1,2,3]);
$results = Interrogator::search('foo', null, [1,2,3]);

The normal search() function wraps SQL wildcards (%) around the search term and uses the LIKE operator. Speaking of wildcards, both search() and searchExact() accept normal "human" wildcards like * and ?. The asterisk will be replaced with % (multiple characters) and the question mark will be replaced with _ (single character) before conducting the Search.

Or you know the Question and you want to find all the Answers that match certain criteria, where $question can be the model, the id, or the unique slug:

$results = Interrogator::searchQuestion('foo', 'App\User', $question);

Maybe all you know is the type of the Question (and the class_name, maybe.):

$results = Interrogator::searchSmallText('foo', 'App\User');
$results = Interrogator::searchLargeText('foo', 'App\User');
$results = Interrogator::searchNumeric('foo', 'App\User');
$results = Interrogator::searchDateTime('foo', 'App\User');
$results = Interrogator::searchMultipleChoice('foo', 'App\User');
$results = Interrogator::searchFileUpload('foo', 'App\User');

Oh and of course all of these accept the aforementioned wildcard replacement. ;)

You might need multi-tenancy, or you might not. Right now, this supports multi-tenancy with Laravel Spark by adding team_id to every model. You'll need to add the team_id to your requests (usually the last parameter) so that Interrogator can scope accordingly. Otherwise, team_id will stay null and your query scope will be ->where('team_id', null).

Please feel free to contribute and expand our single- and multi-tenant ability!

Thanks for wanting to contribute! We take this package seriously and want to maintain its integrity. We will look at all suggestions and PRs but will ultimately have the last say in what gets merged or not.

MIT