Laravel Eloquent Query Filter using Pipeline

One of the features of Laravel which surely useful is the pipeline. Pipelines is one of the most used components in the Laravel for example middleware.

Basically, with a pipeline we can pass an object through a stack of tasks and get the result via a callback.

The benefit of pipeline for query filtering is that we can reduce tons of lines to several lines. Being unaware of the pipelines, we would usually set up a controller, get an instance of Eloquent of User model, and apply some condition based on query string.

Let’s see below queries.

$query = User::query();
if ($request->username) {
    $query->where('username', 'LIKE', "%$request->username%");
}

if ($request->email) {
    $query->where('email', 'LIKE', "%$request->email%");
}
if ($request->address) {
    $query->where('address', 'LIKE', "%$request->address%");
}
if ($request->occupation) {
    $query->where('occupation', 'LIKE', "%$request->occupation%");
}
return $query->get();

The drawback is that, it’s obviously that filters conditions will continue to grow as well as duplication of the same filter for other query. In other hand, the maintainability of the code kind of headache.

There is where Pipeline become a hero 😎

return User::query()->filter([ 
    UsernameFilter::class,
    EmailFilter::class,
    AddressFilter::class,
    OccupationFilter::class
])->get();

Simple and short right? But before that,

Create a trait named Filterable and create a scope

class Filterable
{ 
   public function scopeFilter($query, array $through)
   {        
        return app(Pipeline::class)
               ->send($query)            
               ->through($through)            
               ->thenReturn();    
   }
}

Then, use it in any model that you prefer, for example User model

class User 
{
    use Filterable; 
}

2. Create a filter for example UsernameFilter

class UsernameFilter 
{
    public function handle($query, $next)
    {        
        if (request()->mobile_phone) {           
           $query->where('username', request()->mobile_phone);      
        }         
        
        return $next($query);  
    }
}

The usage is just like this

User::query()->filter([UsernameFilter::class])->get();

If you want for more accessibility to the pipeline, you can also pass an attribute.

class StringFilter 
{
    public function handle($query, $next, $column) {
        if (request()->{$column}) {           
            $query->where($column, 'LIKE', request()->{$column});      
        }         
        
        return $next($query); 
    }
}

The usage is just like this

User::query()->filter([
   'StringFilter:username',
   'StringFilter:email',
])->get();

Done. Simple and clean 😎

For your references:

https://www.hackdoor.io/articles/discovering-useful-laravel-pipelines-edf09b3015bd

https://gist.github.com/afiqiqmal/ef19a4ea45770a285e4e9f85c1651ad1