Is laravel seeding as hard as I see it or I'm stumbling with something that's not that complicated?

Question

The last few days I've been rocking my head against the wall with the seeders. I can't seem to get the hang of it.

The relationships are very simple:

A Brand hasMany products and each product belongs to a single brand.

A Category hasMany products and each product belongs to a single category.

Given that, I'm creating 5 categories at the beginning so I can retrieve a random one later.

I'm also creating 10 brands, and for each brand I'm creating 50 products and make them belong to that brand. Then I create the relationship with the product and the category, retrieving a random category for each product.

Im getting this error:

PDOException::("SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1364 Field 'brand_id' doesn't have a default value")

I dont understand why I'm getting this error because I'm creating the relationship prior to creating the products:
$brand->products()->saveMany(factory(App\Product::class, 50).

public function run()
    {
        $users = factory(\App\User::class, 1000)->create();
        $categories = factory(\App\Category::class, 5)->create();

        factory(App\Brand::class, 10)->create()->each(function ($brand) {
            $brand->products()->saveMany(factory(App\Product::class, 50)->make()->each(function ($product) use ($brand) {
                $product->category()->associate($this->getRandomCategory());
                $product->save();
            }));
        });
    }
    
    private function getRandomCategory() {
        return \App\Category::all()->random();
    }

    private function getRandomUser() {
        return \App\User::all()->random();
    }

I don't know if I'm making a big deal out of seeding but it just seems complex to me. Maybe I'm taking a wrong approach using the factories. Is there any great tutorial for seeding out there? Thanks in advance!

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 03 '20 at 17:36

This is actually not a seeding problem. The PDO-driver already tells you about the issue:

brand_id does not a have a default value

Probably Laravel assumes, that the id column does not need a default and therefore does not insert it with an id. But the column seems to have no default definition in the database (should be smth. like AUTO_INCREMENT). And that's the reason why you receive an error from the database.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 04 '20 at 12:33

The problem was this one:

The saveMany method gets called after the each function is done, so I was kinda saving the product before it added the brand relationship. Thats why it couldnt assign the foreign_key brand_id. This is the block of code working:

public function run()
    {
        $users = factory(\App\User::class, 1000)->create();
        $categories = factory(\App\Category::class, 5)->create();

        factory(App\Brand::class, 10)->create()->each(function ($brand) {
            $brand->products()->saveMany(factory(App\Product::class, 50)->make()->each(function ($product) use ($brand) {
                $product->category()->associate($this->getRandomCategory());

            }));
        });
    }

    private function getRandomCategory() {
        return \App\Category::all()->random();
    }

    private function getRandomUser() {
        return \App\User::all()->random();
    }

Is laravel seeding as hard as I see it or I'm stumbling with something that's not that complicated?

2 Answers2