Laravel 4 Eloquent: how to select where value is in array?

Question

Suppose I have a Model with db record like this:

row1: id: 1  users:["1","2","3"] 
row2: id: 2  users:["3","4","5"]

Users are data formatted from json_encode(array($user_id)) . Now I want to retrieve the model if user_id in users . So if my user_id is 2, i will retrieve only row 1, but if my user_id is 3, i will retrieve both row1 and row2 .

I tried something like Model::whereIn('users', $user_id)->get(); , it does not work, any other ways to achieve this Eloquent way?

Answer 1

Hope you are storing your user id in session or something, so your_id refers to the id assigned to yourself.

Model::where('id','!=',your_id)->get();

This would return your all the rows, except the id = your_id

Answer 2

I don't think there's a very Eloquent way of doing this. But since you use json_encode, we can assume that all data is formatted the same way, and do something like this:

Model::where('users', 'like', '%"'.$user_id.'"%')->get();

This should work. Your situation is usually best handled with pivot tables, but of course you don't have to use them like the other guy said.