In a new post from the Dotdev.co site there's a tutorial from Amo Chohan helping you write advanced search query filters for Eloquent in your Laravel application.

I recently needed to implement a search feature in an events management project I was building. What begun as a few simple options (searching by name, e-mail etc), turned into a pretty large set of parameters.

Today, I’ll go over the process I went through and how I built a flexible and scalable search system. For those of you who are eager to see the final code, head over to the Git repository to see the code.

He starts off by outlining what he'll be creating and where the need comes from for this more advanced filtering. He uses a company-wide calendar example with events and meetings/clients shown for all users. He defines the filters he knows he'll want to search by and the models relating to the data needed for those queries. He then spends the rest of the post going through the code needed to implement the filtering, starting with a rough (but working) version and refactoring from there. He moves away from the procedural method of applying filters to a query object directly and over to "applying" them more dynamically using a set of filter instances via a Decorator design pattern approach.