I'm teaching myself Laravel by building an application that, amongst other things, fetches data from default Wordpress tables, and I've run into a best-practices question that I'm not sure how to tackle.
I've got a very simple model for the User database that looks like this:
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class User extends Model
{
public $table='wp_users';
protected $primaryKey='user_id';
}
And I'm able to fetch it into an array using a line like $users = User::all(); in my controller that I can then send into my view in any number of different ways.
Now; my question for best practices has to do with accessing multiple values from a particular column or from a set of columns from the database on a website.
Say I want to create a dropdown list that contains the display_name from the database as the ... well, displayed text, and the user_login as the option value that gets passed in the form.
In the "good old" days, I could do this with something like a foreach statement that pushes <?php echo $whatever; ?> into the relevant places in the html, but it's a very ugly solution. I mean ... just look at this stuff:
<?php foreach ($users as $key => $value) {
echo "<option value='" . $key . "'>" . $value['name'] . "</option>";
} ?>
Using Eloquent, I could do something like Form::select('size', array('L' => 'Large', 'S' => 'Small')), and I'm sure there's a way of passing an array into this statement, but that's exactly my problem ... I just can't seem to figure out how to do it. How do I tell the Form statement to use $users[0]->display_name for the first entry, $users[1]->display_name for the second, etc... ?
