Laravel: Where selection for Eloquent Eager Loading relationship

Question

I got two DB tables:

Posts

$table->increments('id');
$table->integer('country_id')->unsigned();
$table->foreign('country_id')->references('id')->on('countries');

Countries

$table->increments('id');
$table->string('name', 70);

I use laravel as back-end. Now I want to implement filtering data for my front-end. So the user can select a country name and laravel should answer the request only with posts that have a country with the specified name.

How could I add this condition to my existing pagination query? I tried this:

$query = app(Post::class)->with('country')->newQuery(); 
// ...
if ($request->exists('country')) {
        $query->where('country.name', $request->country);
}
// ...

... resulting in the following error:

Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'country.name' in 'where clause' (SQL: select count(*) as aggregate from `posts` where `country`.`name` = Albania)

Solution

whereHas method accepts parameter as per Laravel code base,

 /**
 * Add a relationship count / exists condition to the query with where clauses.
 *
 * @param  string  $relation
 * @param  \Closure|null  $callback
 * @param  string  $operator
 * @param  int     $count
 * @return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder|static
 */
public function whereHas($relation, Closure $callback = null, $operator = '>=', $count = 1)
{
    return $this->has($relation, $operator, $count, 'and', $callback);
}

so Changing the code a little as,

$query = ""    

if ($request->has('country'){
$query = Post::with("country")->whereHas("country",function($q) use($request){
    $q->where("name","=",$request->country);
})->get()
}else{
    $query = Post::with("country")->get();
}

By the way above code can be a little simplified as follow;

$query = ""    

if ($request->has('country'){
  $query = Post::with(["country" => function($q) use($request){
  $q->where("name","=",$request->country);
}])->first()
}else{
  $query = Post::with("country")->get();

}

Comments

[HelloWorld0815]

Gives me: FatalErrorException in PostController.php line 77: syntax error, unexpected '=>' (T_DOUBLE_ARROW) error.

[oseintow]

I have updated it. i made a mistake putting the arrow there

[Marcelo Fonseca]

Strangely the simplified version does not seems to work in laravel 7.x. I changed it to use whereHas and its working fine now.