Nov 23, 2020

Level 5

firstOrFail method. Bad approach or just need other conditional?

Good afternoon all,

Quick info about situation :

User registers -> User logs in

The next step that I want to do is get the user to finish his profile so

User hits /profile

This page contains a tab : User profile and a tab Team profile

All worked until the point I added the Team profile.

Controller looks like this :

 public function show(){
        $team = Team::where('id', Auth::User()->team_id)->firstOrFail();
       
        return view ('user.profile.show', ['team'=>$team]);
    }

As you (probably) can imagine (but I ofc didn't think of that) the User did not create or joined a team yet. So the 'firstOrFail' method does it's thing and returns a 404.

So my question is :

Is my approach wrong by using the firstOrFail() method ?

Or, I tried the following conditional (but failed):

public function show(){
	try{
        $team = Team::where('id', Auth::User()->team_id)->firstOrFail();
       	// Team exists
        	return view ('user.profile.show', ['team'=>$team]);
    } catch (ErrorException $e) {
	// Team does not exist 
	return view('user.profile.show');
}

It still gets stuck on the fail...

Than I tried this conditional :

public function show(){
        $team = Team::where('id', Auth::User()->team_id)->get();
            //Found
            return view ('user.profile.show', ['team'=>$team]);    
        if($team->isEmpty()){
                return view ('user.profile.show');
            }
    }

This conditionals throws up = does not exist on this collection instance

So before I try to dig into that issue, is this last approach the best I can do in this case?

Sergiu17

5 years ago

Level 60

Hi, you probably have relations on your models, if so

 public function show()
{
    return view ('user.profile.show', ['team' => Auth::user()->team]);
}

if user has team, good, if not - then null will be returned

1 like

< GDB >

5 years ago

Level 5

Hi @sergiu17,

Thanks for your advice, however, null is not returned but a QueryException :

SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'teams.team_id' in 'where clause' (SQL: select * from `teams` where `teams`.`team_id` = 4 and `teams`.`team_id` is not null limit 1)

In users table, user with id 4 has a team_id of null

in teams teble there is no record of a team with id4

I assume that is because team_id can be null but team table can't have a record with no id

Ok, so that error is avoided by updating your suggestion to :

public function show()
{
	return view ('user.profile.show', ['team' => Auth::user()->team_id]);
}

However, in this case it views the "team"-data as a property of a non-object.

I had this earlier, hence why I defined the $team as :

$team = Team::where('id', Auth::User()->team_id)->firstOrFail();

Mirlan Bekturov

5 years ago

Level 1

Check user's team in view file by relation. For example:

in User model

public team() {
     return $this->belongsTo('App\Models\Team', 'team_id', 'id');
}

check having team in view:

@if (!empty(Auth::user()->team))
	//to do something
@endif

1 like

< GDB >

5 years ago

Best Answer

Level 5

Hi @mirlan bekturov,

In addition to the comment of Sergiu, your remark solves this. However, in my situation the condition needs to be met on the controller.

I've updated my UserController like this :

public function show(){
if(!empty(Auth::User()->team_id)){
    $team = Team::where('id', Auth::User()->team_id)->firstOrFail();
           return view ('user.profile.show', ['team'=>$team]);
	}
	return view('user.profile.setup');
}

So first in my show-method I need to check if the team_id field is empty or not (could have used isset also) When this field is not empty (a team has been linked) the first route will be hit.

If the field is empty the second route will be hit, which is similar, except instead of returning a view that contains $team fields, it will return a view only consisting of $user-fields and under the Team tab an option to add a team.

Your suggestion did help me realise a simple solution, still not 100% this is the best approach though.

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