Using find() in Laravel to retrieve a database object

Question

I am working through the Laravel 4 From Scratch tutorial at https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-from-scratch. Tutorial 4: Database Access describes several methods for retrieving data from a database.

One in particular I cannot get to work:

In my routes.php, I have

Route::get('/', function()
{
  $bottle = DB::table('bottle')->find(1);
  dd($bottle);
});

The only output is the "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." page. In the bottle table of my database, the primary key has the name bottle_ID. I would guess this has something to do with the problem, but I cannot find any information on how to change the find() parameter. So how do I use 'find' to return an object from my database?

The following code does work:

// returns everything from bottle table
$bottles = DB::table('brewery')->get();
return $bottles;

// returns all data for the bottle with an ID of 10
$bottle = DB::table('bottle')->where('bottle_ID', '=', 10)->get();
return $bottle;

// returns all ales from the database
$bottles = DB::table('bottle')->where('beer_type', '=', 'Ale')->get();
return $bottles;

lukasgeiter · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-13 20:48:34Z

3

When used in the query builder (DB::table()...) the find() method has the primary key column hardcoded as id:

public function find($id, $columns = array('*'))
{
    return $this->where('id', '=', $id)->first($columns);
}

What you should do instead is use where() and first():

$bottle = DB::table('bottle')->where('bottle_ID', 1)->first();

Or if you decide to use Eloquent Models you can specify the key column name:

class Bottle extends Eloquent {
    protected $primaryKey = 'bottle_ID';
}

And retrieve the model like this:

$bottle = Bottle::find(1);

answered Feb 13, 2015 at 20:48

lukasgeiter

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1 Comment

acetone Over a year ago

Thank you. I tried both of your suggestions and got both of them to work! It looks like I was on the right track in suspecting my column names, but I really had no idea what to do about it. I had previously been investigating MAMP / Laravel configuration issues, but that was a dead end.

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