Laravel - Relationships - Custom Polymorphic Types

By default, Laravel will use the fully qualified class name to store the "type" of the related model. For instance, given the one-to-many relationship example above where a Comment model may belong to a Post or a Video model, the default commentable_type would be either App\Models\Post or App\Models\Video, respectively. However, you may wish to decouple these values from your application's internal structure.

For example, instead of using the model names as the "type", we may use simple strings such as post and video. By doing so, the polymorphic "type" column values in our database will remain valid even if the models are renamed:

    
    use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Relation;
    
    Relation::enforceMorphMap([
        'post' => 'App\Models\Post',
        'video' => 'App\Models\Video',
    ]);
	

You may call the enforceMorphMap method in the boot method of your App\Providers\AppServiceProvider class or create a separate service provider if you wish.

You may determine the morph alias of a given model at runtime using the model's getMorphClass method. Conversely, you may determine the fully-qualified class name associated with a morph alias using the Relation::getMorphedModel method:

    
    use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Relation;
    
    $alias = $post->getMorphClass();
    
    $class = Relation::getMorphedModel($alias);
	

When adding a "morph map" to your existing application, every morphable *_type column value in your database that still contains a fully-qualified class will need to be converted to its "map" name.