Build a Forum with Inertia and Laravel
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45. Setting up for best answers

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01. Introduction and demo
6m 59s
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02. Getting set up
10m 36s
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03. Modifying registration for usernames
7m 15s
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04. Figuring out the forum layout
5m 57s
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05. Creating and listing topics
9m 15s
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06. Basic discussion listing
13m 33s
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07. Pinning discussions
4m 1s
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08. Tackling pagination in Inertia
8m 23s
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09. Customising pagination text in Laravel
52s
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10. Showing a discussion
6m 4s
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11. Setting up discussion posts
5m 53s
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12. Listing through discussion posts
5m 28s
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13. Adding more data to posts
8m 24s
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14. Adding pagination to posts
1m 35s
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15. Adding a post preview to discussions
4m 52s
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16. Adding the last reply to discussions
5m 54s
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17. Outputting discussion participants
8m 4s
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18. Limiting participants in the UI
5m 56s
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19. Ordering discussions by last post
4m 30s
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20. Handling deleted users
2m 31s
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21. Counting replies
8m 13s
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22. Building our first filter
8m 31s
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23. Highlighting current filters, and merging with pagination
5m 37s
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24. Adding auth specific filters
6m 40s
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25. Adding the topic filter
8m 18s
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26. Scaffolding the new discussion form
13m 29s
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27. Toggling the create discussion form
9m 2s
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28. Keeping form state
4m 59s
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29. Storing a new discussion
11m 29s
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30. Discussion validation and authorization
5m 1s
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31. Generating markdown for posts
8m 37s
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32. Toggling the markdown preview
7m 43s
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33. Fetching and displaying markdown
8m 6s
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34. Adding a markdown shortcut toolbar
5m 53s
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35. Dealing with SVG icons
7m 46s
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36. Creating the reply form
7m 48s
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37. Basic Inertia permission checking
6m 26s
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38. Creating replies to discussions
5m 37s
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39. Jumping to posts
11m 40s
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40. Automatically scrolling to posts
6m 18s
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41. Toggling post editing
7m 32s
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42. Editing posts
3m 36s
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43. Deleting posts
4m 21s
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44. Deleting discussions
6m 7s
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45. Setting up for best answers
7m 29s
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46. Toggling the best discussion answer
12m 14s
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47. Solved and unsolved filters
2m 23s
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48. Indexing discussions for search
8m 6s
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49. Searching discussions
12m 35s
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50. Debouncing search
2m 47s
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51. Adding mentionable functionality to forms
6m 32s
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52. Indexing users for mentioning
9m 9s
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53. Hooking up users for mentions
10m 10s
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54. Detecting and storing mentioned users
9m 54s
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55. Adding the mentioned filter
2m 26s
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56. Adding mentions to the markdown toolbar
1m 1s
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57. Adding mentions to the reply form
7m 21s
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58. Fixing up some unauthenticated state
1m 1s
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59. Fixing up post scrolling
1m 48s
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60. Reviewing SSR (Server-side rendering)
8m 20s
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61. Preventing parent posts from being deleted
2m 31s
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62. Improving solution marking
4m 9s
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Transcript

00:00
We're going to do a little bit of setup now for probably the most useful feature on the forum, and that is marking a best answer. So in this episode, we'll go ahead and do the setup, take a look at how the relationships work and how we're going to actually access the solution.
00:14
And then in the next episode, we'll look at toggling this. So to start with, we need to really figure out where we're actually going to store the best answer. Are we going to do that on the post itself or are we going to do that on the discussions table with a reference to that post? Well, after a lot of experimenting, the best place to store this on
00:35
is on the discussions table itself. And that way, what you can do is get the best answer as an overall relationship on the discussion itself. And that really helps because you might want to display the best answer elsewhere out of the context of a discussion view. So this offers a lot more flexibility and it doesn't really create any extra complexity at all. So we're going to go
00:59
ahead and first of all, create out a migration and we're going to add a solution post ID to the discussions table. And I've named it like this specifically because solution is the thing that we are looking at. But obviously, this reference is a post ID on the posts table. So that's helpful for just working out what the relationship is. OK, so let's open up that migration and let's go
01:25
ahead and fill this in here. So this relates to a posts table. So we can actually use a foreign ID here. We're going to go ahead and give solution post ID. Now, the only difference to using a foreign ID to what we've already done, for example, when we created out the discussions table, we use foreign ID on user ID and we constrained it. Now, Laravel worked out that this must belong to the
01:52
users table just because of the way that we formatted the column name. However, in this case, solution post ID is a little bit different. So first of all, let's make this nullable because, of course, not every topic or not every discussion is going to have a solution. And now when we say constrained, we actually want to give the post table in. So Laravel knows what
02:14
this is. If it was just post ID, it would work out. But with this solution prefix, it won't be able to. Now, again, really importantly, if a post within here that is already marked as the solution is deleted, we want to set this back to null because then the discussion is not going to have a solution if that particular post with the solution gets deleted. OK, so let's go ahead and fill in the
02:38
down migration. Let's drop that column solution post ID and we are good. Let's go ahead and migrate what we have here and we're done. Now we're going to go ahead and set the relationship up. So if we go over to the discussion model, let's go all the way down to the bottom here and let's create out a solution relationship. This is going to say this belongs to. Might seem a
03:02
little bit odd, but if you think about it, it's the way that you would normally set up a relationship like this. For example, on a discussion, we have a topic which is a belongs to topic. So even though it doesn't seem like a discussion belongs to a solution, it's the most appropriate relationship in this case. So we're going to go ahead and pass in the post here and we'll give the column name
03:24
because once again, Laravel is not going to be able to work this out on its own. OK, so now that we have the solution, let's add the solution to the discussion resource. So let's go ahead and just copy this one down. We'll say solution and when loaded, we want to go ahead and pull that in. So over on the show page, let's just go up to the top of the template and let's just dump out
03:54
the discussion solution here. And what topic are we on? Need help with view. So let's take this post here and say that this is the solution. So let's find the ID for this is 14. So on this one, let's mark this specifically in the database. So let's go over to discussions, need help with view and we'll set that to 14. Let's save that out. And remember, this is not going to show unless
04:23
it's loaded. So over on the discussion show controller, let's go ahead and make sure we load this into our discussion up here. Solution and we may need some other eager loading here as well, just depending. And there we go. There's the solution. Now, once again, the reason that we're outputting this is a completely separate resource is we might need to use this or show this somewhere
04:48
else out of the context of here. Or you might always want to show the solution under the first post or you might always want to show the solution at the top. But what we can really simply do now is just when we're iterating through this list of post based on this, does the ID equal the same thing? Well, then it's the solution. The alternative, of course, because this is a slightly more
05:13
slower solution, because if you think about it, you're outputting the entire resource. You could just do something like solution ID and then just output this solution post ID and then you could still compare it in the same way. So if you find that as you add to this or it does get slower, just remove the entire thing here and just use the solution ID to compare.
05:33
But we're going to output that anyway in case we need it later. So now that we've got this in here, let's go over to show and just get rid of the solution there. What we're now going to do is add in the authorization for whether we can mark something as solved now that we've got that data in there. And then we're going to go ahead and look that later. So I'm going to go ahead and
05:54
get rid of this solution post ID and let's go over to the discussion policy to do this. The reason we're going over to the discussion policy is we want to know if a specific user can solve this discussion at all. Doing this on an individual post does not make sense because if the user owns the discussion, they can choose the solution. So we're going to add this to the
06:17
overall discussion policy. So we're just going to call this solve. And we just, again, want to make sure that the user owns the discussion. So now over on the discussion resource, we can go ahead and add this in here. Let's swap this for solve. And now we can go ahead and output this over on each of the posts. So if we look for the links that we've already got here,
06:40
let's go ahead and say mark best solution. And now remember, we need to go into for this to show post discussion user can solve. So we're going back into that discussion relationship to find out whether we can solve the overall discussion. And that's it. So let's give this a refresh. And at the moment, of course, I can't mark a solution on here at all. I would have to do that on one of
07:08
my own topics. So let's find, well, all of mine have no replies, but you can see that we have mark best solution in here. OK, so now that we've got all of the setup done and we are a little clearer on how this is going to work, let's jump over to the next episode where we're going to look at actually clicking on this to toggle this and show it on the UI.

Episode summary

In this episode, we kick off the work needed to support marking a "best answer" on our forum discussions! It's all about setting up the database and relationships so we can pick one post in a discussion as the solution, and highlight it wherever we need.

We start with some quick decisions: should we track the "best answer" on the post itself, or on the discussion? After weighing the options, we go with adding a solution_post_id to the discussions table, since it's cleaner and gives us more flexibility to access or display the solution from anywhere.

You'll see how to write a migration to add that solution_post_id as a nullable foreign key (since not every discussion will have a solution right away). We also cover some Laravel quirks—like how to make sure foreign keys work properly even with custom column names, and ensuring that deleting a solution post sets the solution field back to null.

Once the migration is done, we set up the Eloquent relationship in the Discussion model, and tweak the discussion resource so that when we're displaying a discussion, we can also show its solution post if it exists. You'll also see how to eager load the relationship for efficient queries.

Finally, we make sure that only the user who owns the discussion can mark a post as the best solution by tweaking the policy. There's a quick preview in the UI so you can see where the button will go. At the end, we're all set up to move on to the fun part—actually toggling the best answer from the interface! That's coming next episode.

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