Convert Eloquent Builder to Query Builder

Question

It seems that everyone is asking how to convert Query\Builder to Eloquent\Builder. I need the opposite - I have a Model with some scopes defined which I create a query from. The result that it returns is an instance of my model. I want it to be a a plain object.

Fetching a model and the converting to an stdClass doesn't seem right to me.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Yes. You can build up the query using the Eloquent query builder, but then you can actually execute the query using the base query builder, which will return stdClass objects.

Below is an example. Obviously you can chain all this stuff together into one line, but I broke it out into multiple lines to explain what's going on. Assume you have an active() scope on your User model:

// start an eloquent query but don't execute it yet
$query = User::active();

// add any other conditions...

// get the base builder for the eloquent builder
$baseQuery = $query->getQuery();

// will return a standard array of stdClass objects
$users = $baseQuery->get();

Another example to just return one object:

// will return a stdClass object
$user = User::active()->getQuery()->first();

Be aware, though, that you do lose Eloquent query functionality, such as relationships and eager loading.

For example:

$user = User::with('posts')->active()->getQuery()->get();

This will not run the query for the posts for the users, and the posts will not be attached to the stdClass objects returned.