Eloquent should support composite keys

[aebersold]

Eloquent assumes heavily that you are using surrogate keys on your tables (the id field in every table). However in real world usage, particularly older database systems not designed with web frameworks in mind, there are often tables with composite keys. That is, the primary key is over two or more columns. Often, you can't just add autoincremented id's. This is definitely a game stopper for a lot of use-cases, where you are forced to access existing RDBMS (e.g. building a frontend for an existing db). See also this reddit post about this issue.

The schema builder has already support for composite keys, however eloquent doesn't seem to support it yet.

I request the feature to use composite keys in your eloquent models and queries. The default configuration for surrogate keys is fine, just add the option.

[Marwelln]

I would like to have this supported too.

[fabioboris]

Me too.

[nesl247]

I agree, this is extremely annoying at the moment. Unfortunately I'm not in charge of a lot of data I need to access.

For the moment, I'm just overriding newQuery() in my models by doing something like

function newQuery()
{
    $query = parent::newQuery();
    $query->... // Add constraints here
    return $query;
}

[aebersold]

@nesl247 this is a good workaround. So did you specify primaryKey with one field and added the second field as a where-clause in the newQuery method? Can you give me some actual code?

[tsilenzio]

You could view my bug report (#5517) which has a work-around that works flawlessly for me.

[nesl247]

@aebersold Yes, that is exactly what I did. In my case I was using a BaseModel and a bunch of child classes that extended my BaseModel, so I had a protected $secondaryKey = 'something' and a protected $type = 'someType'.

function newQuery()
{
    $query = parent::newQuery();
    $query->where($this->secondaryKey, '=', $this->type);
    return $query;
}

[pmccarren]

I would really like to have this supported as well.

[cgwyllie]

+1

[weotch]

I put this in my Eloquent Model subclass to enforce my extra column ('locale'). Maybe it'll help someone.

    protected function setKeysForSaveQuery(Builder $query)
    {
        parent::setKeysForSaveQuery($query);
        $query->where('locale', '=', $this->locale);
        return $query;
    }

+1
I just get an common error while saving model with composite keys
PDO::lastInsertId() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given

[jonagoldman]

+1