How to manually create a new empty Eloquent Collection in Laravel 4

Question

How do we create a new Eloquent Collection in Laravel 4, without using Query Builder?

There is a newCollection() method which can be overridden by that doesn't really do job because that is only being used when we are querying a set result.

I was thinking of building an empty Collection, then fill it with Eloquent objects. The reason I'm not using array is because I like Eloquent Collections methods such as contains.

If there are other alternatives, I would love to hear them out.

Answer 1

It's not really Eloquent, to add an Eloquent model to your collection you have some options:

In Laravel 5 you can benefit from a helper

$c = collect(new Post); 

or

$c = collect(); $c->add(new Post); 

OLD Laravel 4 ANSWER

$c = new \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection; 

And then you can

$c->add(new Post); 

Or you could use make:

$c = Collection::make(new Post); 

Answer 2

As of Laravel 5. I use the global function collect()

$collection = collect([]); // initialize an empty array [] inside to start empty collection 

this syntax is very clean and you can also add offsets if you don't want the numeric index, like so:

$collection->offsetSet('foo', $foo_data); // similar to add function but with $collection->offsetSet('bar', $bar_data); // an assigned index