All Tutorials

Tutorial • July 14, 2015 • 1 min read • Free

Eloquent: filter only rows which has related "children" rows

Simple use-case: you want to filter only those categories which have at least one product. Or course, you write Category::with('products')->... but how do you filter out those empty categories? Those with no product? There's an app function for that: has().

#eloquent performance #eloquent methods #eloquent tips

Tutorial • July 13, 2015 • 8 min read • Free

How to customize error messages in Request Validation?

Laravel 5 has an awesome new function - Request Validation. It separates the logic of Validation into kind of a separate layer - Requests, which reside in the folder app/Http/Requests. After the form validation, it auto-magically shows error messages. But what if we want to customize them?

#validation

Tutorial • July 10, 2015 • 1 min read • Free

Did you know about view()->exists() function?

When you load a View from the Controller, there could be a situation when you don't actually know which view to load - the name could be dynamic. For example, you would use different Blade templates for sending emails. There is a neat function to assure your chosen View file actually exists.

Tutorial • July 09, 2015 • 2 min read • Free

Why use $appends with Accessors in Eloquent?

Eloquent has a convenient feature called Accessors - you can define your own custom fields on top of existing in the database table. But then there's an Eloquent property $appends - should we use it or not? And what's the difference?

#accessors #eloquent tips

Tutorial • July 08, 2015 • 3 min read • Free

CRUD: How to avoid building whole Form for Delete button

There is one annoying thing in Laravel RESTful approach - if you want to have Edit/Delete links in your tables, Edit is done easy with a link to URL, but for Delete you have to build the whole form. Is there a way to avoid it?

#CRUD

Tutorial • July 07, 2015 • 2 min read • Free

There's no PUT/PATCH/DELETE method, or how to build a Laravel form manually

Laravel RESTful controller mechanism is a very convenient thing - we generate Controller, write {{ Form::xxxx() }} methods in Blade templates and it works like magic. But there's a little trick there which I want to talk about - it's PUT/PATCH/DELETE methods for updating the database entries.

Tutorial • July 06, 2015 • 1 min read • Free

belongsTo() and withTrashed() - linking to deleted row

Let's say we have DB table products, which is linked to table categories with a field products.category_id = categories.id, Eloquent helps us to define a relation easily. But what if the category gets (soft) deleted, but we still need to have that relationship to be returned for history reasons? You can use withTrashed() method here.

#eloquent relations

Tutorial • July 03, 2015 • 1 min read • Free

Did you know: affected rows after Eloquent update

Another quick tip - if you need to know, how many rows were actually affected if you launch Eloquent update() statement - it cannot be easier.

#eloquent tips

Tutorial • July 02, 2015 • 2 min read • Free

Laravel 5.1: empty option in Form::select with lists()

There is one small upgrade in Laravel 5.1 which breaks apps with earlier versions - it is related to <select> dropdown items. For a long time, Eloquent had a useful way of passing options to Form::select() - but adding an empty parameter doesn't work in Laravel 5.1 anymore. Here's what to do.

Tutorial • June 30, 2015 • 1 min read • Free

How to customize "artisan down" page?

Artisan has a convenient command artisan down for an occasion when you need to put your web-project down for a while - for the case of deployment, maintenance or anything like that. Question - how to customize that temporary error page?