Is this a correct use of polymorphic relationships?

Hey there,

I have been trying to create a preferences system for my app to control a number of features. There are two different models that can have preferences associated with them, say, Organization and Employee.

I have defined a table called preferences in my schema that looks like this:

preferences:
  - id: unique id
  - preference: string
  - description: string
  - default: string
  - type: string (Either 'Employee' or 'Organization', depending on whether this is a user-specific or organization-specific preference)

I have a second table called preference_overrides that just contains the "changed" preference values (if an Employee changes a preference, their provided value is inserted into this overrides table)

preference_overrides:
  - preference_id: integer references preferences(id)
  - value: string (user-provided value overriding the default in preferences)
  - entity_id: integer (this is either an Employee id or an Organization id, depending on the preference being set)
  - entity_type: string (either 'Employee' or 'Organization', again, depending on the preference type

Needless to say, I'm having trouble getting Eloquent to behave as I like, and I'm not even sure what I'm attempting is correct from a design standpoint. The behavior I'm trying to get is basically an API that can be used like this:

$employee = Employee::find(1)
dd($employee->preferences); // Show all preferences of type 'Employee' in a 'preference_title' => 'current value' format

$org = Organization::find(1);
dd($org->preferences); // Show all preferences of type 'Organization' in a 'preference_title' => 'current value' format

Am I on the right track? Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

So it sounds like what you want is a many-to-many polymorphic. Many People can have many preferences. Many Organization can have many preferences. So you need 2 tables.

preferences
   id
   name

the "pivot" table

preferenceables
   preference_id
   preferenceable_id
   preferenceable_type | string "Employee" or "Organization

The 2nd part of your question I'm a little confused about but it sounds like you can do that as pivot data inside the preferenceables table