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Laravel 7 Infinite Category Implementation Methods and Best Practices

gitbox 2025-06-28

Introduction

Laravel is a popular PHP development framework that offers many powerful features, including infinite categories. Infinite categories are a way of organizing data into a tree structure where each node can have an unlimited number of child nodes. Infinite categories are commonly used in various applications such as news categories, product categories, etc.

Implementation Method

Database Table Design

To implement infinite categories, we first need to design the database table. A common design method involves using two fields: id and parent_id. The id field uniquely identifies each node, and the parent_id field indicates the parent node of the current node. The parent_id of the root node is usually 0.

CREATE TABLE categories (
    id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    parent_id INT DEFAULT 0
);

In this example, we created a categories table with id, name, and parent_id fields. The id field is an auto-incrementing primary key, the name field stores the category name, and the parent_id field stores the parent node's id.

Database Query

To retrieve all subcategories of a specific category, we can use a recursive query. Here is an example using Laravel's Eloquent ORM for recursive querying:

class Category extends Model
{
    public function children()
    {
        return $this->hasMany(Category::class, 'parent_id', 'id');
    }

    public function descendants()
    {
        return $this->children()->with('descendants');
    }
}

In this example, we defined the children and descendants relationship methods for the Category model. The children method returns all direct subcategories of the current category, while the descendants method returns all descendant categories.

Displaying Category List

To display the category list in a view, we can use a recursive view. Here’s an example using Blade templates:

@foreach ($categories as $category)
    {{ $category->name }}
    @if ($category->children->count())
        @include('categories.partial.list', ['categories' => $category->children])
    @endif
@endforeach

In this example, we use the @foreach tag to display the category list. For each category, we first display the category name, then check if there are any child categories. If there are child categories, we use the @include directive to include a partial view and pass the child categories to it.

Conclusion

This article introduced methods to implement infinite categories in the Laravel framework. We first designed a database table to store category information, then used Eloquent ORM for recursive queries, and finally used Blade templates to display the category list. Infinite categories are a very useful feature that helps us better organize and manage data.

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