Laravel – Differences between two solutions of a method in a controller

A stack overflow user answered me two ways to return each person’s furniture in a ‘one to many’ relationship. This worked well.

My question is to know the difference in the two ways. The advantages and disadvantages of each way.

IMPORTANT: Laravel Version: 5.8

First solution:

public function showPersonFurnitures($id) {
    $person = Person::with('furnitures')->findOrFail($id);     
    $furnituresOfEachPerson = $person->furnitures; //<-----
    
    return response()->json($furnituresOfEachPerson);     
}

Second solution:

public function showPersonFurnitures($id) {
    $person = Person::with('furnitures')->findOrFail($id);     
    $furnituresOfEachPerson = $person->furnitures()->get(); //<----
    
    return response()->json($furnituresOfEachPerson);      
}

Answers:

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Method 1

The given answers are vague and incomplete, so here’s a better explanation hopefully:

Situation 1 $person->furnitures(): When you call any of a model’s relations as a function, you get an (incomplete) query object for that particular relation. That means whenever you call $person->furnitures(), any additional functions you chain on this result like ->where() are actual SQL operators and directly modify the query. In order to complete the query, you should call ->get() (or a function like ->pluck()) at the end to retrieve the actual data.

Situation 2 $person->furnitures: When you call any of a model’s relations as a property, you retrieve the complete relation collection for that model. This means that $person->furnitures lazy-loads the collection if it is not available on the model yet. Any additional functions you chain on this result like ->where() will act on the PHP collection.

By using Person::with('furnitures')... you make sure that the relation is already loaded (Eager Loaded) after the findOrFail() call. You might note that this is not particularly useful with respect to loading 1 model (since you might just as well call $person->furnitures whenever you need it), but the important thing to remember here is that this with() method is extremely useful when you are retrieving collections of a model, like $persons = Person::where('activated', 1)->with('furnitures')->get(). This last query only executes 2 queries: 1 for retrieving persons, and 1 for retrieving all furniture related to these persons.

Method 2

Overall, the difference for those 2 methods are not huge and you will get the same result, except:

• $person->furnitures uses relationships, quite similar to eager loading that it retrieves data based on the One to Many relationship.
• $person->furnitures()->get() is implemented from the perspective of collection, which is why it has the syntax of querying a collection.

Method 3

They are same, but $person->furnitures requires extra steps to understand tha this is relation, and finally call $person->furnitures()->get()

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0