Hi, thanks for the detailed reply.
Although I understand your point of view, as I wrote you to the email, we're not Laravel experts. Whole Laravel support was created based on documentation and a fantastic Laravel community which helped us with the testing and gave us a lot of advice during implementation.
Regarding base class, this is something we can easily implement as long as it's a common string that will be replaced in exported clas.
Regarding "activities, this is very strange. Skipper should not allow you to create two associations with the same alias exactly because of this error. Can you please send me your project (or at least these entities?). How this model was created? Maybe it's a bug in the database export?
Regarding abstract classes, this is a necessary part of Skipper export. We're not able to export directly to user code for the Laravel framework. For example, in Doctrine2 where @ORM annotations are used, we are able to distinguish between user-code and skipper-generated code. But in the case of Laravel we need to rewrite whole abstract class during every export to keep it in sync with Skipper model. So, unfortunately, we're not able to export it without that.
Regarding "expert" model, feel free to write us an idea for improvement and we will try to implement it. But we're not able to prepare some "expert" mode automatically. Every property from Skipper needs to be manually mapped to Php code in the case of Laravel. What you're suggesting is working for Doctrine, Propel, etc where we're able to map Skipper XML model to Doctrine XML and it's relatively easy for users to add custom attributes, defines new structures, etc.
But in the case of Laravel, every feature has its own way of representations - static arrays, properties, methods with own structure and format. And we're not able to prepare some super-universal export which automatically creates such code.
So, as in the base class case, we would need to know:
- what/where the property should be in Skipper
- how exactly should look export in exported files
based on this we will be able to implement it. We're doing our best to make Skipper as best as possible, so we will do our best to implement any reasonable feature and idea.
Thanks