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📄 TablePopulate - High-Level Overview

TablePopulate is a powerful utility class designed to streamline and standardize the population of database tables in Laravel-based applications. It plays a central role in the DBContextSeeder system, providing an extensible interface to populate tables with large volumes of data—either for testing, simulations, or preloading content.

🌟 Key Features​

  • Flexible Input Sources: Supports seeding data from arrays, callable seeders.
  • Batch Insertion: Efficiently inserts data in configurable batch sizes to reduce memory usage and increase performance.
  • Retry Mechanism: Automatically retries failed insertions, helping mitigate transient database issues.
  • Pre/Post Hooks: Provides before/after callbacks for custom logic (e.g., logging, cache clearing) during the population process.
  • Foreign Key Handling: Automatically disables/enables foreign key checks around inserts for clean truncation and reseeding.

🧠 Core Concepts​

TableSeeder Integration​

The TablePopulate class depends on a TableSeeder, which defines:

  • The target table name
  • A mapping of field names to their corresponding seeder logic

This separation of concerns makes it easy to reuse and customize seeding logic across different datasets.

Callbacks​

You can attach before() and after() callbacks to inject behavior at key points in the seeding lifecycle, offering a high degree of control.

use IPLeiria\ESTG\EI\DBContextSeeder\TableSeeder;
use IPLeiria\ESTG\EI\DBContextSeeder\TablePopulate;

$seeder = new TableSeeder('table', 'en_US');
(...)
$populator = new TablePopulate($seeder);
$populator->before(fn() => echo "Starting...")
          ->after(fn() => echo "Done!")
          ->populate(1000); // Populates 1000 entries