is_null behaviour php laravel 4

Question

I was in the process of building a small API system using laravel. This is a small piece of code from it which searches for user, and if it exists, sends a json response back. When I ran this code such that it should return no user(usercontent is {}), the is_null still returns false. I thought it should return true in this case. I had planned to use it in my code to check if certain users exist, but now it seems to be failing everytime.

have i misunderstood something? Can someone explain what I missed? Thanks.

Response code:

if($user)
{
    return Response::json(array(
        'error' => 'true',
        'message' => 'User exists.',
        'user' => is_null($user),
        'usertype' => gettype($user),
        'usercontent' => $user
    ), 400);
}

Response json:

{
    "error":"true",
    "message":"User exists.",
    "user":false,
    "usertype":"object",
    "usercontent":{}
}

EDIT:

i did a

var_dump($user);
var_dump(empty($user));

which seem to return

object(Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection)#201 (1) { ["items":protected]=> array(0) { } } 
bool(false)

EDIT 2:

$user = User::where('mobile_number', '=', Request::get('mobile_number'))
                    ->orwhere('email_id', '=', Request::get('email_id'))
                    ->take(1)
                    ->get();

Answer 1

Based on your edited question, if you use take() the returned object would be a Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection, instead of Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model, even if the returned collection has one model object, or none (in that case, an empty collection will be returned).

Instead, you can use find() and get a model object using the primary key, or add first() to your query to get the first result from the query as a model object. These two methods will return null if the query does not match an entry.

For example:

$user = User::find(1);

Output:

{
  "error":"true",
  "message":"User exists.",
  "user":false,
  "usertype":"object",
  "usercontent":{
    "timestamps":true,
    "autoHashPasswordAttributes":true,
    "validationErrors":{},
    "throwOnValidation":false,
    "autoHydrateEntityFromInput":false,
    "forceEntityHydrationFromInput":false,
    "autoPurgeRedundantAttributes":false,
    "incrementing":true,
    "exists":true
  }
}

$user = User::find(483);

Output: empty

For your specific query, you can modify it as the following code to make it work:

$user = User::where('mobile_number', '=', Request::get('mobile_number'))
                    ->orwhere('email_id', '=', Request::get('email_id'))
                    ->first()