New Driver Ideas

[glorand]

New Driver Ideas

This document outlines ideas for new storage drivers that could be added to the laravel-model-settings package after the main driver-based refactoring is complete.

1. Generic Cache Driver

• What it is: A storage driver that uses Laravel's generic Cache facade instead of being tied to a specific implementation like Redis.

• How it works: This driver would use Cache::get() and Cache::put() to store the settings. The cache key would be generated based on the model's type and ID.

• Why it's useful: This would be a major improvement in flexibility. It would allow users to leverage any cache store supported by Laravel (Memcached, DynamoDB, Database, File, etc.) simply by updating their config/cache.php file. This makes the package far more adaptable to different application architectures.

2. Filesystem Driver

• What it is: A driver that stores model settings as individual JSON files on a configured filesystem disk.

• How it works: It would use Laravel's Storage facade. The settings for a User with ID 123 could be stored at a path like model_settings/users/123.json.

• Why it's useful:

  • Portability: Settings are plain text files that can be easily backed up or version-controlled.
  • Simplicity: Requires no database or cache service.
  • Human-Readable: Settings can be viewed and even edited directly in the filesystem.

3. Array Driver (For Testing)

• What it is: A non-persistent driver that only stores settings in a PHP array for the duration of a single request.

• How it works: The driver uses a simple static array to hold settings. All data is lost once the request is finished.

• Why it's useful: This is the perfect driver for automated testing (Pest/PHPUnit). It's extremely fast and ensures that tests run in isolation without needing to interact with a database or cache, preventing data from leaking between test runs.