Retrieve unique entries from DB using Eloquent Laravel 4 - laravel

Question

I am using Laravel-4 to build an application. I am trying to make the best use of Eloquent ORM. Currently I am displaying a list of db entries which all have a number of tags associated with them
To the right I display a grid of all the tags however it is showing duplicate tags. I would only like to show unique tags
This is my code:
<div class="tags-panel">
<div class="tags-title"><h1>Tags</h1></div>
<div class="tags-cloud">
#foreach(Tag::distinct()->get() as $tag)
<span class="num"> {{ Tag::getAmount($tag->id) }} </span> {{$tag->name}}
#endforeach
</div>
</div>
Does Eloquent provide a way of only retrieving distinct entries from the db?

Answer 1

Try using Tag::groupBy('field_name')->get()
<div class="tags-panel">
<div class="tags-title"><h1>Tags</h1></div>
<div class="tags-cloud">
#foreach(Tag::groupBy('field_name')->get() as $tag)
<span class="num"> {{ Tag::getAmount($tag->id) }} </span> {{$tag->name}}
#endforeach
</div>
</div>

Answer 2

To use the distinct()-function you have either have a select() in your chain, or use a field as an argument in your get()-function. For example:
$tags = Tag::distinct()->get(array('field'));
or
$tags = Tag::select('field')->distinct()->get();
You could also instead use groupBy('field') if you don't want to supply field names:
$tags = Tag::groupBy('field')->get();