Advices to implement child comments on comments (How to set it up)

I am working with Laravel and have created a morphable comment table with laravel. Now I want to implemnt the reply function so people can answer to comments. I only do need the first level of answering. So, you can answer a comment but you cannot answer on a comment child. There is only one level of comment childs and not 2 or 3 like on Facebook.

My question to you now is, which is the best way to solve this. Because in my laravel view blade I am looping through each comment and want to print my child comments on this commment to (I just don’t know how do to his?).

So basically, I would like to know how you would design the table, how you would map it and how you would print it in the view.

Here is my table so far:

CREATE TABLE `comments` (
  `id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `commentable_type` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `commentable_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `user_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `post_status_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '4',
  `content` text COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `created_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  `updated_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `comments_commentable_type_commentable_id_index` (`commentable_type`,`commentable_id`),
  KEY `comments_user_id_index` (`user_id`),
  KEY `comments_post_status_id_index` (`post_status_id`),
  CONSTRAINT `comments_post_status_id_foreign` FOREIGN KEY (`post_status_id`) REFERENCES `post_statuses` (`id`) ON DELETE CASCADE,
  CONSTRAINT `comments_user_id_foreign` FOREIGN KEY (`user_id`) REFERENCES `users` (`id`) ON DELETE CASCADE
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=34 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Answer

Child comments should just be more comments except they are mapped to another comment.

Create a comment_children table.

Structure should be:

id: BIGINT comment_id: BIGINT child_id: BIGINT

Then you can create a hasManyThrough children relationship on your Comment model and use the comment_children table to match them.

This will allow you to eager load the child comments, you can make your mode always do this by adding:

protected $with = [‘children’]

You will also want a comments relationship on your PostStatus model.

Set up your model to always load this relationship also by adding:

protected $with = [‘comments’]

Now whenever you fetch a post, the collection will always contain all the comments and all the children.

Now to access it, something like:

$post = Post::where(‘id’, 1)->first()

And in your blade:

@foreach($post->comments as $comment)
    // display comment
    @foreach($comment->children as $child)
        // display child comments
    @endforeach
@endforeach