Making a tree with MySQL datas - json

Question

I have a MySQL table like this:
+------+-----------------+---------+------------+
| id | name | refferal| reference |
+------+-----------------+---------+------------+
| 1 | Alex Muller | 1 | null |
| 2 | John Doe | 2 | 1 |
| 3 | Tom Foe | 3 | 1 |
| 4 | Harry Pott | 4 | 3 |
| 5 | Kate Garry | 5 | 3 |
| 6 | Mike Blue | 6 | 4 |
+------+-----------------+---------+------------+
(more data than this...)
I need to turn that data to JSON file with Laravel. Like this:
[{"id":1,"name":"Alex Muller","parent":0},
{"id":2,"name":"John Doe","parent":1},
{"id":3,"name":"Tom Foe","parent":1},
{"id":4,"name":"Harry Pott","parent":3},
{"id":5,"name":"Kate Garry","parent":3},
{"id":6,"name":"Mike Blue","parent":4}]
At the and of this I will get a tree view like this:
TREE
I just made this json file with my own write. And I don't know what to do. I'm waiting your answers. Thank you.

Answer 1

If you want to add extra fields like "parent" in your example you can use map on the collection:
$users = User::where(function($query){
...
})->get()->map(function($user){
return array(
"id" => $user->id,
"name" => $user->name,
"parent" => *INTEGER*
);
})->toJson();
Or if you just want to encode the model attributes, you can use toJson serialization directly with the collection:
$users = User::User::where(function($query){
...
})->get()->toJson();
for further information, refer to the links:
https://laravel.com/docs/collections
https://laravel.com/docs/eloquent-serialization#serializing-to-json

Answer 2

On the model get the keys you need and then with map() change the key reference to parent, on that check if is null the reference to put a 0 then encode the array for json with json_encode.
$array = Model::get(['id', 'name', 'reference'])
->map(function($model){
return [
'id' => $model->id,
'name' => $model->name,
'parent' => is_null($reference->reference)? 0 : $reference->reference,
];
})
->toArray();
Then just make a json with that array:
echo json_encode($array);