Implementation for League Challenges

Question

I'm looking for some advice as to how I should go about designing the logic for my application in conjunction with Laravel. So far, I have the basic infrastructure created; however, I'm currently working on a League table and moving forward I want to ensure that it will be flexible enough to allow for future changes, and I also want to make use of Laravel's features more so than just the basics.

So far, I have a class 'League' which contains an 'id, title, rules, status, created_at, updated_at', and a 'LeagueController' that lists leagues that are currently open, and also allows users to sign up for each of them.

Every time a user signs up for a league, a 'LeagueEntry' is created which contains 'id, league_id, wins, losses, draws', i.e. the statistics shown in the league table. Simply enough so far :)

Within the table, the user has the option of challenging any one of the other players within the league. This is where my predicament comes in. Where I could simply create a new separate object called 'Challenge' and use a 'ChallengeController' to manage active challenges that exist between two players, I'm looking for a better way to implement this.

Another reason for this concern is that I'll be implementing a 'Tournament' class at a later point, which will also be using the 'Challenge' class (every time a player is set to challenge another in an elimination bracket).

One way of doing this would be to create an abstract class 'Challenge', and have a 'LeagueChallenge' and 'TournamentChallenge' that extend this abstraction; however, I've been told that this wouldn't be possible with Laravel. Please correct me if this is not the case. In this case, would it be best to use a Repository Design Pattern?

As you can see, I want to create my 'Challenge' class with as much flexibility as possible, and I'm looking for any of Laravel's features I may have overlooked, as well as any basic design principals I haven't thought of.

Any ideas on how to better approach this problem are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

One way of doing this would be to create an abstract class 'Challenge', and have a 'LeagueChallenge' and 'TournamentChallenge' that extend this abstraction; however, I've been told that this wouldn't be possible with Laravel.

According to your question given above you can use an abstract class and can extend it when creating sub-classes but if you need to use Eloquent by extending the Eloquent model then you can't extend two classes at the same time and it's a limitation in PHP not for Laravel, but you may use a different approach.

Just create a Base class by extending the Eloquent like this:

// Challenge Model
abstract class Challenge extends Eloquent {
    // Force Extending class to define this method
    abstract public function someMethod();
}

Then create sub-classes by extending the Challenge class like this:

// LeagueChallenge Model
class LeagueChallenge extends Challenge {
    public function someMethod()
    {
        //...
    }
}

// TournamentChallenge Model
class TournamentChallenge extends Challenge {
    public function someMethod()
    {
        //...
    }
}

You may use repository pattern in your application, it will help you to maintain and test your application easily but you are not bound to use this.

Answer 2

I suggest you to look in to this https://github.com/LaravelIO/laravel.io , this is made by one of the laravel contributors. It is really interesting how he approaches and structures his files.