Laravel Travel Agency API From Scratch

Now it's time to take care of the second part of the client's description of the Tours List: filtering and ordering.

Task Description From Client

1. Users can filter (search) the results by priceFrom, priceTo, dateFrom (from that startingDate) and dateTo (until that startingDate).
2. User can sort the list by price asc and desc. They will always be sorted, after every additional user-provided filter, by startingDate asc.

Filtering Tours: Eloquent when()

First, let's take care of the filter.

Here's our Controller at the moment:

app/Http/Controllers/Api/V1/TourController.php:

public function index(Travel $travel)
{
    $tours = $travel->tours()
        ->orderBy('starting_date')
        ->paginate();
 
    return TourResource::collection($tours);
}

And our goal is to process the endpoint like this:

/api/v1/travels/{slug}/tours?priceFrom=123&priceTo=456&dateFrom=2023-06-01&dateTo=2023-07-01

So, we have four possible parameters:

• priceFrom
• priceTo
• dateFrom
• dateTo

And all of them are optional, so there may be only one of them passed, or all four.

So, our goal is to build a dynamic query based on different request() parameters.

We will add a Request $request parameter, which will be auto-resolved by Laravel and contain all the GET parameters.

And then, we will use the Eloquent method when(), which has two parameters:

• a condition
• and how to transform the query in case of that condition is true

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
 
class TourController extends Controller
{
    public function index(Travel $travel, Request $request)
    {
        $tours = $travel->tours()
            ->when($request->priceFrom, function ($query) use ($request) {
                $query->where('price', '>=', $request->priceFrom * 100);
            })
            ->when($request->priceTo, function ($query) use ($request) {
                $query->where('price', '<=', $request->priceTo * 100);
            })
            ->when($request->dateFrom, function ($query) use ($request) {
                $query->where('starting_date', '>=', $request->dateFrom);
            })
            ->when($request->dateTo, function ($query) use ($request) {
                $query->where('starting_date', '<=', $request->dateTo);
            })
            ->orderBy('starting_date')
            ->paginate();
 
        return TourResource::collection($tours);
    }
}

You can read more about the when() method in...