[Proposal] add non-persistent methods in EmbedsMany

[alexandre-butynski]

Sometimes we want to attach or detach a related model without database update like in this typical example :

public function update($id)
{
    $user = User::find($id);
    $user->fill(Input::get());
    $user->addresses()->destroy(Input::get('addresses_to_destroy'));
    $user->addresses()->createMany(Input::get('new_addresses'));
    $user->save();
}

For now, all the methods of EmbedsMany make the changes persistent. Couldn't we have methods for the same operations without database update ?

In order to not create dozens of methods with confusing names, what do you think about changing attach and detach methods to let them doing same operations that save and destroy but without persistence ? An other one could be fine for creating related object from attributes, what do you think about build ?

I'm available for quick implementation.

[jenssegers]

It's an interesting thought, but Laravel's save and create methods are also persistent right?

[alexandre-butynski]

In a many-to-many relation maybe but, for example, in the belongsTo relation you have an associate method that is not persistent and just set the parent_id attribute.

[jenssegers]

It might be a good thing to implement an associate method to do this. Is there an inverse method for this?

[alexandre-butynski]

The only non persistent method in Laravel relations seems to be associate because belongsTo is the only one relation that don't touch to an other table... exactly like the embedsMany relation.

[jenssegers]

We could introduce an dissociate method to do this. I think most of the code is already there. It's just a matter of extracting the associate/dissociate functionality to a separate method that can be used by the original methods.

[alexandre-butynski]

Perfect, I do a PR for that.