calebporzio/sushi

On a project I've been working on recently at work, I needed a way of grabbing a list of "frequencies" in various places in my application, there's several ways I could've done this

• Created a new database table, stored them in there and then created a model to be able to query them. This would've meant that if any more entries needed adding, I'd either have to built functionality to be able to add them, OR add them directly in the database. This didn't seem like the right solution here.
• I could've added them into a config file called frequencies.php and then referenced them in there. Whilst this solution didn't require database data fudging, it somehow didn't feel right either.
• I could've hardcoded the same list in all the places I needed it to be, nope, definitely not this solution.

After some googling, I discovered the Sushi package by Caleb Porzio. If you're unaware of Caleb's work, he's responsible for things such as Livewire, AlpineJS and, well, Sushi.

Sushi is a way of utilising all of the Eloquent niceness, but not utilising a database. So if you have a really small and simple dataset, for example, a list of words, and storing them in a database seems overkill, Sushi can help you out.

After adding the package as a dependency in my application, I created a Frequency model and added the following to it:

use Sushi;

protected array $rows = [
    ['value' => 'hourly', 'name' => 'Hourly'],
    ['value' => 'daily', 'name' => 'Daily'],
    ['value' => 'weekly', 'name' => 'Weekly'],
];

This is the same as having a database table called frequencies and storing 3 rows in that, each with a value and name. With this data, I can say with 99% certainty that it will never be edited, no other values will be stored and I don't need to tie it to any other date with foreign keys etc. Having this in a database is simply not necessary, but I still wanted to be able to treat the data as if it was in a database.

Using this solution, I can get a list of Frequencies that I can then pass into my view:

Frequency::all()

I can then also hook it into my validation rules:

$request->validate([
    'frequency' => 'required|string|in:'.Frequency::pluck('value')->join(','),
]);

For what I needed, this does the job perfectly. I can't say I'd use this solution that often but this was a rare occasion where it just didn't make any sense to store such a simple dataset in a database.