Laravel

One of the biggest advantages of using an ORM system is the ability to manipulate rows in a database table as objects within your codebase. Eloquent provides several methods that can be accessed directly from models to query the database and filter results without having to write SQL statements. In this guide, you’ll learn more about how to make database queries using Eloquent models.

When creating APIs, we often need to work with database results to filter, interpret or format values that will be returned in the API response. API resource classes allow you to convert your models and model collections into JSON, working as a data transformation layer between the database and the controllers.

In a previous section of this series, you updated an existing Artisan command in order to support the new lists feature. Although there are commands to insert and delete links, the demo application currently doesn’t have a command to edit existing links. This can be useful to move links between lists, for instance, or update a link description. In this guide, you’ll create a new Artisan command to update existing links in the database.