Laravel PHPDoc Model Collections

Laravel is a powerful PHP framework that is widely used by developers for building web applications. One of its key features is the Laravel Eloquent ORM which provides a simple and intuitive way to interact with a database using PHP syntax.

When working with models in Laravel, you may need to retrieve multiple records from the database at once. The Eloquent ORM provides a way to accomplish this using model collections.

What are model collections?

In Laravel, model collections represent a set of model instances that have been retrieved from the database. They are essentially an array-like object that allows you to perform operations on a group of records.

Model collections in Laravel come with a number of useful methods such as count() to get the number of records, sum() to get the sum of a column, pluck() to retrieve a column, and many more. You can also use the where() method to filter the records in the collection based on a condition.

Creating model collections

To create a model collection in Laravel, you can use the get() method on a model instance. This will retrieve all records from the database that match the query conditions. For example:

$posts = App\Post::where('is_published', true)->get();

This will retrieve all published posts from the database and return them as a model collection.

Working with model collections

Once you have a model collection, you can perform a range of operations on it. One common use case is to loop through the collection and display the records on a page. Here is an example:

@foreach ($posts as $post)
    <div class="post">
        <h2>{{ $post->title }}</h2>
        <p>{{ $post->content }}</p>
    </div>
@endforeach

You can also use the count() method to display the number of records in the collection:

<h2>{{ $posts->count() }} posts found</h2>

Or you can use the pluck() method to retrieve a specific column from the records:

$titles = $posts->pluck('title');

These are just a few examples of what you can do with model collections in Laravel.

Conclusion

Model collections are a powerful feature of Laravel's Eloquent ORM that allow you to retrieve and work with groups of records from a database in a simple, intuitive way. By using model collections in your Laravel application, you can significantly improve the efficiency and performance of your code.