Laravel Eloquent's where method only returns an array of the first record in the database

Question

I have this code:

$subOffers = SubOffer::get()->where('offers_id', 1);

When I return $subOffers, I get an array like this.

[{"id":1,"offers_id":"1","price":"123.0","start_date":"2022-07-23","stop_date":"2022-07-24","additional_info":"r832ufr803yw98fhew98f8h93wq"}]

But when I change 1 to 2 or 3 or 4 or... I get an object like this.

{"3":{"id":4,"offers_id":"4","price":"12,341","start_date":"2022-07-10","stop_date":"2022-07-13","additional_info":null}}

In this case I changed it to 4 and got n-1 keys.

How is this going? Why am I receiving an object instead of an array? This happens when Offers_id is greater than 1. Offers_id is the foreign key.

Answer 1

Okay, I found the solution

$subOffers = SubOffer::where('offers_id', $id)->get();

Just I have to swap where with get

But I still don’t know, what’s going on? I want to know why this is happening.

Answer 2

The get() method on eloquent returns a Laravel collection, i.e. anything you put after it, such as where() affects the resulting collection, see https://laravel.com/docs/9 . x/collections, a collection is an array-like object, but with a lot of functionality similar to database queries, but all in local memory.

If you have a where() method before get(), you are building a database query and the query will not be executed until get(). You will get different results because the query building and collection methods work similarly, but they perform different operations.