Jeff Madsen has some helpful hints for the Laravel (or just Eloquent) developers out there when it comes to models. In this new post to his Medium site he looks at using custom pivot table models (and choosing the right technique to use them).

Laravel is “opinionated”, but that usually just means that there are a lot of defaults set up that push you toward a certain style. Over the years I have found very few cases where you can’t easily override these; more often than not, it is simply a case of adding another function call when you instantiate something.

As I thought about the way I would normally code around Mark’s problem, and then searched and found the more direct answer from the docs, it occurred to me that this was a perfect example.

He starts with the more "standard" way of working with pivot tables in Laravel (code example include) using the updateExistingPivot method. He talks about the difference between writing the code and designing the code, making it more maintainable and well-architected. He talks about moving the logic into a service class but points out a few issues with that approach as well. Finally, in his last option, he covers the special "Pivot" model included with Eloquent and shows it in use.