Eloquent and database functions

posted 11 years ago

Hi there. I'm new to Laravel so please be gentle with me! I'm a little stumped as to how I would go about inserting a function rather than a value using Eloquent. For example

INSERT INTO test (a, b) VALUES ('hello', NOW());
UPDATE test set b = NOW() WHERE a = 'hello';

If I wanted this to happen automagically would it be best to overload the create and save methods such as:

public static create($data) {
  $data['b'] = 'NOW()';
  parent::create($data);
}

As it stands, that's going to try to insert the string 'NOW()' into the database and not run the NOW() function. What's the trick?

Last updated 3 years ago.

marwelln

replied 11 years ago

Solution

Use DB::raw(...).

In your case:

public static create($data) {
  $data['b'] = DB::raw('now()');
  parent::create($data);
}

Last updated 3 years ago.

cgoosey1

replied 11 years ago

why not use date("Y-m-d H:i:s") ?

Last updated 3 years ago.

c0ntax

replied 11 years ago

Worked a treat!

The reason I didn't use date("Y-m-d H:i:s") was that I wasn't really all that interested in NOW() as the actual function. I'm doing some work with PostGIS which requires a whole load of stuff like:

$this->geom_point = DB::raw('ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(' . $this->longitude . ',' . $this->latitude . '), ' . $this->srid . ')');

So I was looking for the more generic solution.

Last updated 3 years ago.

Moderators