Laravel 5.3 Query - Left join some table - mysql

Question

I'm trying to get the most recent record for each candidate_id from a ìnterviews` table.
This is what I want to achive:
I'm using Eloquent on laravel and have already tried this methods (with and without eloquent):
$candidates = DB::table('interviews')->select('interviews.*', 'i2.*')
->leftJoin('interviews as i2',
function ($join) {
$join->on('interviews.candidate_id', '=', 'i2.candidate_id');
$join->on('interviews.created_at', '<', 'i2.created_at');
}
)
->whereNull('i2.candidate_id')
->get();
and with eloquent I've tried this:
$candidates = Interview::leftJoin('interviews as i2',
function ($join) {
$join->on('interviews.candidate_id', '=', 'i2.candidate_id');
$join->on('interviews.created_at', '<', 'i2.created_at');
}
)->whereNull('i2.candidate_id')
->get();
If I change get() to toSql() I have exactly the same query that's shown on the above image, but running on laravel I'm getting always these results (this using the first method, with query builder):
Anyone know why I get this results? Is hard to understand that laravel is doing the same query that I do in HeidiSql but I get diferent results :(
Any tip?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Because you are using ->select('interviews.*', 'i2.*') combined with ->whereNull('i2.candidate_id') I am assuming the second select parameter is overriding all fields on the interviews table with nulls, try reversing the order to ->select('i2.*','interviews.*') or not use the i2.* at all.
This is because the output ignores the alias and only uses the fieldname as element key in the returned collection.
Hope it works.
Perfect case scenario you pick the exact columns you want from each of the joined tables for e.g. it may go like this: table1.id,table1.column1,table1.column2,table2.column2 as smth_so_it_doesnt_override