Friendly URLs with per-account incrementing Ids in Laravel

For Invoice Ninja we wanted each account to be able to use friendly URLs where their Ids would increment.

This would mean the URL for the first client they create would be https://www.invoiceninja.com/clients/1

Many accounts are stored in the same database so we’re not able to use the auto-incrementing Id field. The solution we’re using is to have all classes which store user data (ie, clients, invoices, payments, etc) extend the EntityModel class. To create a new instance you call the createNew() method.

Here are the benefits of this approach:

• Context is tracked: The account and user the record belong to is automatically set. If an item is created by the system (ie, an automatically sent recurring invoice) the context can be inherited from an existing record.
• Out of the box security: When setting foreign key values we use getPrivateId() to resolve the public id to a private table Id. This prevents the user from hand modifying the HTML to reference another account’s data.
• Easy scoping: Using the scope() method we’re able to easily load data filtered by the account. For example Client::scope()->get() returns all of the accounts clients, while Client::scope($publicId)->get() returns a client using its public Id.

And finally the code…

class EntityModel extends Eloquent
{
	protected $softDelete = true;
	public $timestamps = true;
	
	protected $hidden = ['id', 'created_at', 'deleted_at', 'updated_at'];

	public static function createNew($parent = false)
	{		
		$className = get_called_class();
		$entity = new $className();
		
		if ($parent) 
		{
			$entity->user_id = $parent->user_id;
			$entity->account_id = $parent->account_id;
		} 
		else if (Auth::check()) 
		{
			$entity->user_id = Auth::user()->id;
			$entity->account_id = Auth::user()->account_id;			
		} 
		else 
		{
			Utils::fatalError();
		}

		$lastEntity = $className::withTrashed()->scope(false, $entity->account_id)->orderBy('public_id', 'DESC')->first();

		if ($lastEntity)
		{
			$entity->public_id = $lastEntity->public_id + 1;
		}
		else
		{
			$entity->public_id = 1;
		}
		
		return $entity;
	}

	public static function getPrivateId($publicId)
	{
		$className = get_called_class();
		return $className::scope($publicId)->pluck('id');
	}

	public function scopeScope($query, $publicId = false, $accountId = false)
	{
		if (!$accountId) 
		{
			$accountId = Auth::user()->account_id;
		}
		
		$query->whereAccountId($accountId);

		if ($publicId)
		{
			if (is_array($publicId))
			{
				$query->whereIn('public_id', $publicId);
			}
			else
			{
				$query->wherePublicId($publicId);
			}
		}
		
		return $query;
	}
}

I’m sure there are other ways to tackle this problem. Let me know in the comments or on twitter @hillelcoren if you have a different solution.