How to serialize data from the database in laravel

January 4, 2022

how can I reformat data from the database easily with relationships in Laravel, have been looping through the queried data and reformat as I loop then push in an array then after I return the array as a json but I’m finding challenges as the data grows it is totally slowing down.Is there a better way to do it.

>Solution :

Oh, I also have that problem but the better way to solve it is to use laravel Eloquent API Resources for example to create a resource using this command.

php artisan make:resource UserResource

Then after you can reformat your data and relationships from that resource for example like below

public function toArray($request)
{
    // return parent::toArray($request);
    return [
        'id' => $this->id,
        'patientName' => $this->patient_name,
        'patientContact' => $this->patient_contact,
        'patientEmail' => $this->patient_email,
        'patientCode' => $this->patient_code,
        'NIN' => $this->patient_nin,
        'country' => $this->country,
        'DOB' => $this->dateofbirth,
        'patientAddress' => $this->patient_address,
        'branch' => $this->whenLoaded('branch'),
        'gender' => $this->gender,
        'country_details' => $this->whenLoaded('cou'),
        'status' => $this->p_status,
        'visits' => $this->visits->count(),
        'lastvisit' => $this->visits->max(),
        'allvisits' => $this->visits,
        'dateCreated' => Carbon::parse($this->created_at)->format('d/m/Y | h:i A'),
        'dateUpdated' => Carbon::parse($this->updated_at)->format('d/m/Y | h:i A'),
    ];
}

for more info check https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/eloquent-resources