Dynamic Filters With Laravel Eloquent

Did you ever had a Laravel application and needs filters over your API? You might have tried GraphQL, however, you could write a simple one and don’t need any integrations.

In this article I’m going to implement a simple service which could work with Laravel eloquent ORM, it would handle relations and also the basic operators which uses the most.

The Idea

You are developing a RESTful API and want to let your users filter the indexes with different fields or even on the relations of your model.

For instance, a simple article model which has so many tags and comments , also a user who owns it. Now you have an API which lists all the articles /api/articles . How could you let the user filter over the tags or comments? How could you filter all the articles of a specific user? Moreover, how could you combine all of them together?

Let’s add a filter to our API to find all the articles of user with id = 1.

/api/articles?filters[]=user.id=1

Seems cool? Now I want the articles of user 1 which have a specific tag.

/api/articles?filters[]=user.id=1&filters[]=tags.name=ipsa

In the next step, we are going to setup the basic project and then start adding these dynamic filters to that.

Setup

I was looking for a real world sample project and found out there is a complete Laravel application which could be used. Take a look at their github repository and walk through the README to set it up.

https://github.com/gothinkster/laravel-realworld-example-app

Extend the Idea

We know that there is a query param called filters which contains the relation/field, operator and the value.

Here we are going to implement the basic logical operators which are = , != , > , < , >= and <= . Also I have added 2 custom operators ~ and () .

~ would work as LIKE in queries with % around it.

e.x. /api/articles?filters[]=slug~real-world

SQL: SELECT * FROM articles where slug like '%real-world%';