Eloquent is a great thing – you can build your query step-by-step and then call get() method. But sometimes it gets a little tricky for more complicated queries – for example, if you have multiple AND-OR conditions and you want to put brackets, how to do it properly?

Wrong way – easy to make mistake

Let’s say we need to filter male customers aged 18+ or female customers aged 65+ (whatever the reason is, it’s just a hypothetical example). Simple MySQL query would look something like this:

... WHERE (gender = 'Male' and age >= 18) or (gender = 'Female' and age >= 65)

... WHERE (gender = 'Male' and age >= 18) or (gender = 'Female' and age >= 65)

Now let’s transform it to Eloquent:

// ...
$q->where('gender', 'Male');
$q->orWhere('age', '>=', 18);
$q->where('gender', 'Female');
$q->orWhere('age', '>=', 65);

// ...
$q->where('gender', 'Male');
$q->orWhere('age', '>=', 18);
$q->where('gender', 'Female');
$q->orWhere('age', '>=', 65);

But wait, if we launch it like that, MySQL query wouldn’t have any brackets and would be launches as this:

... WHERE gender = 'Male' and age >= 18 or gender = 'Female' and age >= 65

... WHERE gender = 'Male' and age >= 18 or gender = 'Female' and age >= 65

Which is wrong order – it would actually be executed in this order:

... WHERE ((gender = 'Male' and age >= 18) or gender = 'Female') and age >= 65

... WHERE ((gender = 'Male' and age >= 18) or gender = 'Female') and age >= 65

The worst