Laravel Collections “when” Method

February 16, 2017 / Eric L. Barnes

Starting at v5.4.12, Laravel Collections now includes a when method that allows you to perform conditional actions on the items without breaking the chain.

Like all the other Laravel Collection methods this one can have a lot of use cases but one example that comes to mind is being able to filter based on a query string parameter.

To demonstrate that example, let’s pretend we have a list of hosts from the Laravel News Podcast:

$hosts = [
    ['name' => 'Eric Barnes', 'location' => 'USA', 'is_active' => 0],
    ['name' => 'Jack Fruh', 'location' => 'USA', 'is_active' => 0],
    ['name' => 'Jacob Bennett', 'location' => 'USA', 'is_active' => 1],
    ['name' => 'Michael Dyrynda', 'location' => 'AU', 'is_active' => 1],
];

Previously to filter based on a query string you might do something like this:

$inUsa = collect($hosts)->where('location', 'USA');

if (request('retired')) {
    $inUsa = $inUsa->filter(function($employee){
        return ! $employee['is_active'];
    });
}

With the new when method you can now do this all in one Collection chain:

$inUsa = collect($hosts)
    ->where('location', 'USA')
    ->when(request('retired'), function($collection) {
        return $collection->reject(function($employee){
            return $employee['is_active'];
        });
    });