How to pass arguments to Laravel factories?

Question

I have a users table and a one-to-zero/one relation with a businesses table (users.user_id => businesses.user_id). On my users table I have a discriminator which tells me if the user is of type business and therefore I need to have details on the businesses table as well.

I want to create my Users with my factory which currently is working and then only create business details where the discriminator points to a business account.

I have three options in my mind:

1. Create from users factory and then using '->each()' do some checks on the discriminator and create a new business user using a the factory. However I cannot pass to the business factory the user_id that the user was assigned.
2. First create the users. Then in my Business seeder, retrieve all Users that match a 'business' discriminator. Then for all of these users run a factory that creates the business details. But again, I would have to link somehow the user_id of the already create user with the business factory user_id.
3. In my business factory, create a new User and retrieve the id, thus making the link between users.user_id and business.user_id. However I am using a random generator for user.user_type so even if I have the businesses table filled it might be for users that have the discriminator as 'personal'.

Is there another way? Can I pass arguments from my Seeder to the factory?

Answer 1

The attributes you pass to the create function will be passed into your model definition callback as the second argument.

---

In your case you don't even need to access those attributes, since they'll automatically be merged in:

$business = factory(App\Business::class)->create();

factory(App\User::class, 5)->create([
    'business_id' => $business->id,
]);

Adapt this to your needs.

Answer 2

My code for adding polymorphic 'Admin' users was:

// run model factory
factory(App\Admin::class, 3)->create()->each(function ($admin) {

    $admin->user()->save(

        // solved: https://laravel.com/docs/master/database-testing#using-factories (Overriding attributes)
        factory(App\User::class)->make([
              'userable_id' => $admin->id,
              'userable_type' => App\Admin::class
        ])
    );
});

Hope this helps.