Laravel / Eloquent special relation type based on parsed string attribute

I have developed a system where various classes have attributes consisting of a custom formula. The formula can contain special tokens which refer to different types of object. For example an object of class FruitSalad may have the following attribute;

$contents = "[A12] + [B76]";

In somewhat abstract terms, this means "add apple 12 to banana 76". It can also get significantly more complex than that with as many as 15 or 20 references to other objects involved in one formula.

I have a trait which passes formulae such as this and each time it finds a reference to a model (i.e. "[A12]") it gets it from the database with A::find(12) and adds it to an array of component objects which can be used for other processes later on in the request.

So, in essence, it's a relationship. But instead of a pivot table to describe the relationship, there is a formula on the parent model which can include references to child models.

This is all working. Yay! But it's really inefficient because there are so many tiny queries to get single models as formulae are parsed. One request may quite easily result in hundreds of queries. Oops.

I see two potential options; 1. Get all my apples and bananas from the database at the start of the request and get them from an in-memory store instead of from the database when parsing a formula (is this the repository pattern??). 2. Create a custom relation type (something like hasManyFromFormula) which makes eager loading work so that the parsing becomes much simpler because the relevant apples and bananas would already be loaded into the parent model.

Is there a precedent for this? As for why I am doing it like this, it would a bit tough to explain in brief but suffice to say it is to support a highly configurable data retrieval system which supports as-yet unknown input data configurations.

Help!

Thanks, Geoff

via Chebli Mohamed