Retrieve all parent/child records from database on Laravel (hierarchical data)

Question

I have the following simplified database table structure for a legacy tickets-like system.

messages
  id         INT
  parent_id  INT
  content    TEXT
  answer          


        

Answer 1

Since you are doing hierarchical operations, you should use a strategy to save and retrieve this data from your database.

One approach is to use Nested Set Model, that can make it easier. Laravel has a great package that deals with it, called etrepat/baum, that also explains how it works and I quote:

The theory behind, a TL;DR version

An easy way to visualize how a nested set works is to think of a parent entity surrounding all of its children, and its parent surrounding it, etc. So this tree:

root
  |_ Child 1
    |_ Child 1.1
    |_ Child 1.2
  |_ Child 2
    |_ Child 2.1
    |_ Child 2.2

Could be visualized like this:

 ___________________________________________________________________
|  Root                                                             |
|    ____________________________    ____________________________   |
|   |  Child 1                  |   |  Child 2                  |   |
|   |   __________   _________  |   |   __________   _________  |   |
|   |  |  C 1.1  |  |  C 1.2 |  |   |  |  C 2.1  |  |  C 2.2 |  |   |
1   2  3_________4  5________6  7   8  9_________10 11_______12 13  14
|   |___________________________|   |___________________________|   |
|___________________________________________________________________|

The numbers represent the left and right boundaries. The table then might look like this:

id | parent_id | lft  | rgt  | depth | data
 1 |           |    1 |   14 |     0 | root
 2 |         1 |    2 |    7 |     1 | Child 1
 3 |         2 |    3 |    4 |     2 | Child 1.1
 4 |         2 |    5 |    6 |     2 | Child 1.2
 5 |         1 |    8 |   13 |     1 | Child 2
 6 |         5 |    9 |   10 |     2 | Child 2.1
 7 |         5 |   11 |   12 |     2 | Child 2.2

To get all children of a parent node, you

SELECT * WHERE lft IS BETWEEN parent.lft AND parent.rgt

To get the number of children, it's

(right - left - 1)/2

To get a node and all its ancestors going back to the root, you

SELECT * WHERE node.lft IS BETWEEN lft AND rgt

As you can see, queries that would be recursive and prohibitively slow on ordinary trees are suddenly quite fast. Nifty, isn't it?