Advance Search in Laravel

Every backend application requires a functionality to search data on each module - ex. products, customers, brands, etc. But oftentimes, a basic searching by “name” or “title” is not enough - the client require an advance filtering.

We can create advance search in many ways, unfortunately a lot of example and tutorials online has chosen the wrong path - even our devs.

The Bad Approaches

I’ve seen others used the Model::when method and others are using if/else inside of a where closure.

But the most popular is saving the query in a variable. Then check if a filter exists and if true, they chain a where method to the query object before the ending get().

// url.com/histories?actions[]=created&actions[]=updated
$arrActions = request('actions', null);
$histories = History::orderBy('created_at', 'desc');

if($arrActions){
    $histories->whereIn('action', $arrActions);
}

$histories->get();

While all of the above gets the job done, I do not prefer them - not clean, not reusable, not cool.

A Better Solution

-or best solution would be using the eloquent's local scope. It allows you to add a method in the model where you can perform the filtering. It’s reusable in every instance of that Model - and even accessible in eager loading relationship.

For the purpose of demonstration, lets assume an agent is checking if seller 1 or 2 has bags or purse (category 3 or 4) with a color of blue or red. With that situation we have these GET data in our ProductController, we set them as null by default just in case we are not applying filters:

//http://website.com/products?seller[]=1&seller[]=2&category_id[]=3&category_id[]=4&color[]=blue&color[]=red
$arrSellers = request('sellers', null); // [1, 2]
$arrCatIds = request('category_id', null); // [3, 4]
$arrColors = request('color', null); // ['blue', 'red']

Now in our Product model, let’s add our local scopes. What our scope methods does is checking if the passed filter argument is not null before modifying the query. If the argument is null, it will just return the query builder instance.

// filtering sellers
public function scopeOfSellers($query, $arrSellers) {
    if ($arrSellers) {  
        return $query->whereIn('seller_id', $arrSellers);
    } else {
        return $query;
    }
}

// filtering categories
public function scopeOfCategories($query, $arrCatIds) {
    if ($arrCatIds) {  
        return $query->whereIn('category_id', $arrCatIds);
    } else {
        return $query;
    }
}

// filtering colors
public function scopeOfColor($query, $arrColors) {
    if ($arrColors) {  
        return $query->whereIn('seller_id', $arrColors);
    } else {
        return $query;
    }
}

Let’s now use our local scopes in our ProductController controller.

$products = Product::orderBy('price', 'desc')
    ->ofSellers($arrSellers)
    ->ofCategories($arrCatIds)
    ->ofColor($arrColors) 
    ->get();

Now we can filter products in any controller easily, whether you’re displaying filtered products in the Admin panel or a sidebar widget displaying a dynamic “top 10 products” based on the current category page.

Thanks for reading and be sure to check the official documentation of Local Scopes in the Laravel website.