To Array or Not To Array? - laravel

Question

In my model I get data using something like:
$this->all();
This is then returned to my controller which makes a view:
return View::make('myView')
->with('data', $this->myModel->getAll());
My question is, what's best practice, should the model return eloquent object or an array? By calling ->toArray()?

Answer 1

Short answer is to leave as objects. It seems silly to me to convert to arrays when the objects can be used in the view.
Consider if you might need to foreach through a model's relationships - using an array you either don't have this or have to preload it (even if you won't always have to use it), using an object, you can choose to use the relationship if you want to.
Now, I'm aware this is related to your previous question regarding passing arrays vs. object to the view, but that is a different question entirely. In that question you're basically saying "sometimes I have one object and sometimes I have a collection of objects, how do i handle this in the view". To which my answer would be that you sure ensure the view always sees a collection (or array or whatever), but never to actually convert an object to an array.
In that situation, in the case where you only get one object, just wrap that object in a collection (or array) before it goes to the view and there you go - normalised data done easily.
To wrap your result in a collection
There are many ways of doing this which depend on how you're getting the data in the first place. If you're doing your own Eloquent calls then the simplest solution is to always use ->get() rather than sometimes using ->find() or ->first(). If you use ->get() even in times you expect a single result, it'll return a single result wrapped in a collection already.
However, if you're provided with this someties-object-sometimes-array then you'll have to manually do it. Again this has two different but very similar tehcniques which depends on whether the data is compatible with Eloquent and Collection or whether it's more raw PHP objects and arrays.
Eloquent-compatible
if ($data instanceof \Illuminate\Databse\Eloquent\Model) {
$data = new \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection($data);
}
Standard objects and arrays
if (!is_array($object)) {
$data = array($data);
}
It's really as simple as that.

Answer 2

In my opinion, the cleaner, elegant way is always returning an object.
In a model I would do something like this
class Employee extends Eloquent {
protected $table = 'employees';
}
In the controller
public function index(){
$employees= Employee::get();
return View::make('index')->with('employees', $employees);
}
In the view:
#foreach($employees as $employee)
{{ $employee->name }}
#endforeach

Answer 3

Simply, it depends what do you want to do with returned data. In most cases, we are traversing returned array in a view (with blade), and appending it to some HTML list. I had some issues with passed data to view and unit testing.
Simply, test is not accepting object, so I explicitly had to pass array.