How to check if user email is null? - laravel

Question

I'm trying to authenticate 2 users by inheritance in a Laravel project.
In my migration I have only 1 column that can be null, that column is email.
With that column I'm expecting to double authenticate professors and alumns, I have also 2 types of registers, one has the input email and the other not.
In my database I have 2 users, one is professor, and the other alumn, professor has email, and the other has email also, because they belong to the same table but that email is NULL in alumn row.
I'm trying to check when I login if that user with email column is null, my view returns alumn.
If it's not null my view returns professor.
I tried to check if email is null in my Laravel controller.
This is my code
public function index()
{
$user = User::where('email', '=', Input::get('email'))->first();
if ($user == 'NULL'){
return ('alumn');
}
if ($user != 'null'){
return ('professor');
}
}
And my Laravel router looks like this.
Route::get('/home', 'HomeController#index')->name('home');
I also tried this function in my controller instead the other one.
if (User::where('email', '=', Input::get('email'))->count() > 0) {
// user found
}
And with exists() instead of count().
If you are wondering, I'm returning just a string right now for testing purposes.

Answer 1

The issue you are having is within your conditionals. ($user == 'NULL') and ($user != 'null'). What you are checking for currently if the User object is the follow string: "NULL".
These are not how you check for null. There are many options that will work.
if (empty($user)){
return view('alumn');
}
// OR
if (!$user) {
return view('alumn');
}
// OR
if (is_null($user)) {
return view('alumn');
}
Would work. You could also use is_null. If you wanted to check that user equals null you cannot put quotation marks around null.

Answer 2

The first() method will return null if there's no data so use is_null() instead like :
if ( is_null($user) ) {
return view('alumn');
}else{
return view('professor');
}

Answer 3

FYI, first() will return you null when there is no data in the database, so I hope this will help you
public function index()
{
$user = User::where('email', '=', Input::get('email'))->first();
if ( is_null($user) ) {
return view('alumn');
} else {
return view('professor');
}
}

Answer 4

All the answers above didn't work in my case.
So i did this to make it worth.
public function index()
{
$user = Auth::user();
if ($user->email == ''){
return ('alumne');
}
else{
return ('professor');
}
print_r(Auth::user());
}
First i printed my Auth::user to check if all was working right, then i tried to save the authentification in a variable called user.
Then i checked with a conditional and all worked fine.

Answer 5

public function index() {
$user = User::where('email', '=', Input::get('email'))->first();
if (empty($user)) {
return view('alumn');
} else {
return view('professor');
}
}