Laravel 5.2 get the closest date from eloquent collection

Question

I have Eloquent Event model, which is related towards multiple dates like this:

$event->dates // shows Collection of 8 Eloquent date models

After that i need to pick the only date, what is closest to current time. I know how to do this using query of raw SQL, or DB class. But isnt there any better solution? I dont want to jump into database for data, I already have.

Date format in eloquent models is surprisingly string.

Answer 1

You can use what we call in laravel mutators like this ->

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Event extends Model
{
    public function dates()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Date');
    }

    /**
     * Get Dates for the event.
     *
     * @param  string  $value
     * @return array
     */
    public function getDates()
    {
        $dates = $this->dates()->getQuery()->orderBy('created_at', 'asc')->get();
        return $dates;
    }
}

Hope this helps.

UPDATE

I think now you can also directly do this in the model definition like this -

return $this->hasMany('Date')->orderBy('created_at', 'asc')