Thanks for clearing up my code snippet!

I don't think the orWhere would help me much though. I need to return all contacts where the name is a match and where their agency is a match as well, which is the related model.

Update: Yes, in contact table, their is a field: agency_id

With Edit 2, if I use the "with", I still need to define the condition that give me all contacts where the user has an agency and the agency name is like $something. What is odd, is that in my original post, you can see that the debug query it displays, when ran in sql, give me 1 result, which is what I'm expecting. But when laravel runs it, i'm getting all contacts that have the agency name that is matched.

So I changed the query to the above, but noticed that in the debug query, the 2 parts of the query are not wrapped in "and", so i was checking for either agency name equal or contact name equals.

I changed it to:

$data = Contact::whereHas('agency', function($q) use ($agency) {
              $q->where('name', 'like', "%$agency%");
            })
              ->where(function($q) use ($string) {
                $q->where('name', 'like', "%$string%")
                ->where('job_title', 'like', "%$string%", 'OR')
                ->where('location', 'like', "%$string%", 'OR')
                ->where('address', 'like', "%$string%", 'OR');
            });

However, I'm still getting back all contacts where the agency name was a match, but the debug query is producing this, and when it's ran in Navicat, returns just one contact, which is what I would expect.

select * from `contacts` where (select count(*) from `agencies` where `contacts`.`agency_id` = `agencies`.`id` and `name` like '%active%') >= 1 and (`name` like '%adam%' OR `job_title` like '%adam%' OR `location` like '%adam%' OR `address` like '%adam%') order by `updated_at` desc limit 100 offset 0

Sure, here is the debug query:

[2014-07-18 11:53:07] local.ERROR: select * from `contacts` where (select count(*) from `agencies` where `contacts`.`agency_id` = `agencies`.`id` and `name` like ?) >= 1 and `name` like ? or `job_title` like ? or `location` like ? or `address` like ? order by `updated_at` desc limit 100 offset 0

On the php side of things, I'm getting over 30+ contacts in the response.

And as usual, if I take the debug query from above and run it in navicat, I get back just 1 result, which is what I'm wanting based on the query params for the agency name and contact name.

K, got it working. This is the query:

$data = Contact::whereHas('agency', function($q) use ($agency) {
              $q->where('name', 'like', "%$agency%");
            })
            ->where(function($q) use ($string) {
              $q->where('name', 'like', "%$string%")
              ->where('job_title', 'like', "%$string%", 'OR')
              ->where('location', 'like', "%$string%", 'OR')
              ->where('address', 'like', "%$string%", 'OR');
            });

Now, onto the embarrassing part. I was setting string to the param being passed in. However, I just noticed in the debug query, that it was always a empty like "%%". I was grabbing Input::get('keyword'), but the param was "keywords"

Everything is working now. Appreciate your help on this!