Book Store API Application Using Laravel 8 CRUD Operation

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In this article, we will implement a Laravel 8 CRUD book store application. After reading this article, you will:

• Learn how to create tables in MySQLdatabase with One-to-Manyand Many-to-Many relationships.
• Implement the models and the functions that they serve.
• Know how to implement CRUD with Laravel Resouce Controller
• Get familiar with belongsToand belongsToManymethods

A simple definition of the project

Every book belongs to one publisher, so you will be able to assign your book to a specific publisher or if you can’t find it you can store a new publisher in the database.
Besides that, you can store authors in the authors’ table and include one of them or multiple of them in your book as the author’s name. If you don’t want to read this whole text you can skip it and find the whole code in the repository which I insert the link at the end of the article.

Let’s take a look at how our database is designed, then we’ll dive into the code.

Image by author

One-to-Many Relationship

There is a one-to-many relationship between books and publishers. An element of publishers may be linked to many elements of books, but a member of books is linked to only one element of publishers.

Many-to-Many Relationship

There is a many-to-many relationship between books and authors.
Every book has belonged to many authors and every author has written many books. So in this situation, we will use a table as a pivot table to store relations. Our pivot table is book_authors.

Create Tables in Database

After creating the project with the composer, It’s time to create our tables and migrate them to the database. In Laravel, we’ll use the below command to create the table.php artisan make:migration create_publishers_table
First of all, we’ll create the publishers’ table that will have the below structure

The publishers’ Table Structure

And here is the rest of the tables that you should create in order.

The books’ Table Structure

The authors’ Table Structure

The book_authors Table Structure

Create Models

In this section, we will talk about the models and the functions that they serve. First, we’ll create the Publisher model with php artisan make:model Publishercommand and as you see in the database structure there is a one-to-many relationship between books and publishers, and this is defined by defining a method in the Eloquent model.

The Publisher Model Structure

It’s time to create other models and define the many-to-many relationship between books and authors. so we’ll create the BookAuthor model as a pivot Eloquent. To do this make sure that your model extends Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Pivot

The BookAuthor Model Structure

And now we’ll create the Author model which will contain the function with books name that uses the belongsToManymethod and BookAuthor model as a Pivotmodel to get the list of all books of the author object.

The Author Model Structure

Finally, we’ll have the book model that uses the belongsTo method to get the related publisher in the function with the publisher name. and uses the belongsToManymethod and BookAuthormodel as a pivot model to get the list of all authors of the book object.

Create Controllers

In this project every controller will contain the following functions:

• The index function will be used to get a full list of all records.
• In the store function after validating the requests, the new element will be created.
• The show function is used to get the specific element by passing ID to the function.
• We’re passing the ID to the destroy function and then detecting elements with the given ID and then deleting it.
• The update function is used to update the given element based on the given requests.

The PublisherController Structure

In the BookController store and update function, you will see the $item->authors()->sync($requeest->get('authors')) code. synccan be used to synchronize either side of a belongsToMany relationship. By default, it drops all the relations and just keeps those provided as the arguments. Similarly, if you want to remove a certain entity relationship from the pivot table, you can use the method. For instance, if you want to remove authors from a book you can do this with $item->authors()->detach() code.

The BookController Structure

The AuthorController Structure

Create Routes

Finally, we’ll define our routes in the routes/api.php directory.Using Route:apiResource sets up some default routes. And you can see the list of all routes by running the route:listArtisan command.

Routes/api.php

Now you have a book-store API. The full code is in the below repository.
I hope this course will help you become familiar with database design, one-to-many relationships, and many-to-many relationships in Laravel.

GitHub — hanieas/Tutorial-Book-Store-API