How to format Laravel Eloquent query with optional sections - mysql

Question

Im new to Laravel, but am struggling with how Eloquent queries can have optional sections.
I have the following Eloquent query at the moment:
Posts::where('approved', '=', 'Y')->orderBy('created_at', 'DESC')->take($noofposts)->skip($skipno)->get();
That works fine. However I now need to add two optional sections, which i'd like to do without having to duplicate the query each time.
I need to add AND WHERE userid=$x (looped for one or more times) if $x (which is an array) is present, if its not it should ignore then ... and finally add AND (WHERE status=$y[0] OR $status=$y[1] OR $status=$y[2]) - again if the status flags are not set, then just ignore.
Basically if no flags are set I end up with the original query, but if they are we get
Posts::where('approved', '=', 'Y')->where('userid', '=', '2')->where('userid', '=', '23')->where('status', '=', 'K')->orWhere('status', '=', 'N')->orderBy('created_at', 'DESC')->take($noofposts)->skip($skipno)->get();
I can work it out perfectly in normal PHP, but cannot understand how it would work in Laravel Eloquent.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Neither the user guide nor any website examples seem to look at this kind of scenario!

Answer 1

Fist, instead of chaining orWhere I would use the whereIn function of Eloquent.
whereIn('status', $y);
The problem is, if $y is empty, the request won't work. (I think it just crashes)
So if you want to avoid controls and keep your code clean you can add a query scope in you Post model.
http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/eloquent#query-scopes
scopeOptionalWhereIn($query, $field, $array){
if(!empty($array))
return $query->whereIn($field, $array);
return $query; //return unchanged query
}
Then you can use this scope in your query:
Posts::where('approved', '=', 'Y')
->optionalWhereIn('status', $y)
->orderBy('created_at', 'DESC')
->take($noofposts)
->skip($skipno)->get();
You can probably use the same scope to deal with the userid conditions.