updateOrCreate on belongsTo relationship not working as expected

[ThaDaVos]

• Lumen Version: 5.8.*
• Laravel Version: 5.8.*
• PHP Version: 7.3.*
• Database Driver & Version: MySql 5.7.*

Description:

When trying to use the updateOrCreate method on a belongsTo relationship it's not working as expected: When there's no records, it creates one succesfully but it doesn't assign the id in the foreignkey field, when I know there's a record it just creates a new one because it can't match based on the id because the foreignkey isn't being set I also see the following in the query logs which will always return nothing because 0 is never equal to 1:

select * from models where 0 = 1....

Is this caused because the belongsTo doesn't have an implementation for the updateOrCreate as hasManyThrough in this issue: #16758

Steps To Reproduce:

• Create two tables with a belongsTo relationship from one to the other, for example ModelA belongs to ModelB
• Create new ModelA and then try to updateOrCreate the related model like:

// Below will create a new ModelA and insert a new modelB but if you check the database the foreignkey for ModelB in ModelA will not be set
$modelA = ModelA::updateOrCreate([ 'id' => 1 ], [ 'field1' => 'Bla' ]);
$modelA->modelB()->updateOrCreate([ 'field1' => 'Hello' ], [ 'field2' => 'World' ]);

• Retrieve ModelA and try to update ModelB like:

$modelA = ModelA::where('id', 1)->first(); // just assume it returns a modelA
$modelA->modelB()->updateOrCreate(['field1' => 'Hello'], ['field2' => 'Country']); 
// this will always create a new row because the query will never find a matching ModelB because the foreignkey has never been set

• Rinse and repeat the above step and see many ModelB's appear in your database...

[ThaDaVos]

Also posted it here because I didn't know from which framework it comes: laravel/lumen-framework#967

[driesvints]

Hmm not really sure what's going on here. Appreciating any help with figuring this out.

[ThaDaVos]

A friend of mine said it's probably using _call to call the function because it doesn't exist on the belongsTo relation -> currenlty I worked arround it by setting the foreignkeys manually and then it seems to work, but I don't know why it isn't setting them itself

[staudenmeir]

I'm not sure if this is supposed to work. I think updateOrCreate() really only makes sense for relationships where the foreign key is in the related or pivot table.

You can call ModelB::updateOrCreate() separately and then set the foreign key with BelongsTo::associate().

[ThaDaVos]

But one would expect it to work on both sides of the relationship, don't they?

[staudenmeir]

IMO, updateOrCreate() really only makes sense in one direction here.

[ThaDaVos]

Then maybe throw an error when used wrongly instead of having the create part work?

[driesvints]

@dvdbot might be a good update but sounds like that's more of a feature request. Feel free to open up an issue on the ideas repo.

[epixian]

The whole beauty of Eloquent is in its relationships. belongsTo() returns a query builder just like every other relationship, and the documentation for create() is not currently worded to suggest that it doesn't work with certain relationships.

[tripleten]

+1

[troygilbert]

I got bit by this myself. The comments above about why it's not working (because the BelongsTo relation doesn't implement create()) are correct. But I can't figure out why it shouldn't work. This seems like a clear bug to me. What am I missing?