Laravel 4, Eloquent: Check if there is a Model with certain key-value pair in a Collection

Published 2013-10-17, 16:47

I wanted to find out if there already is a Model with a certain value for a certain column in a Collection that I retrieved realier in my code, e.g. is there already a User with name = Müller in my $users Collection?

$users->contains() can only check if there is a model with a certain primary key, and there also is no method to trivially search through all Models. Of course this all could be hacked together somehow*, but after a bit of searching I found this nice way to solve my question:

$value = 'Müller';
$key = 'name';
if(in_array($value, $users->lists($key))) { ... }

Collection->lists() gets an array with all the values of the Model for the requested key. Checking if our new value is in there, is super simple.

*Of course I first tried it this way:

use $collection->filter() and then count the result
hack $collection->contains() +$collection->find() to accept a field name as a parameter
see 2, but copy the methods as private methods to my controller instead of tinkering with the framework code directly

All 3 solutions worked, but needed lots of ugly code.