Cast Laravel query results to class

Question

When creating a query using the syntax DB::table(\'foo\'), it creates a generic class (stdClass). Is there any way to cast the resulting rows to a specific class?

Answer 1

Typically you'd achieve this by setting the PDO Statement fetch_style to PDO::FETCH_CLASS as below

$statement->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_CLASS, "App\User");

If you look at the method Illuminate\Database\Connection::select you'll see that whilst you can set the fetch_style/fetchMode, you can not the second argument.

public function select($query, $bindings = array(), $useReadPdo = true)
{
    return $this->run($query, $bindings, function($me, $query, $bindings) use ($useReadPdo)
    {
        if ($me->pretending()) return array();

        // For select statements, we'll simply execute the query and return an array
        // of the database result set. Each element in the array will be a single
        // row from the database table, and will either be an array or objects.
        $statement = $this->getPdoForSelect($useReadPdo)->prepare($query);

        $statement->execute($me->prepareBindings($bindings));

        return $statement->fetchAll($me->getFetchMode());
    });
}

Nor can you get access to the statement before fetchAll is called to call PDOStatement::setFetchMode for example.

You could perhaps attempt to extend Illuminate\Database\Connection and utilise that throughout other Database related classes by extending and replacing where necessary but it seems like a hefty task to maintain.

The other option is to use Eloquent which will give you classes back of a particular type but you get the slight additional overhead of hydrating the model objects.

class Foo extends Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model {
    protected $table = 'foo';
}

Foo::all()
Foo::where('col', 1)->get()