[5.5] Add a "qualifyColumn" method to the Eloquent Model

[JosephSilber]

Useful in complex queries where you need to qualify the column name to avoid collision:

function addSomeComplexSubquery($query, $model)
{
    $query->where($model->qualifyColumn('column'), $someValue);
}

[sisve]

What is this? What if my column name actually has dots in it?

[caiquecastro]

Do you have an example for a column with dots?

[decadence]

What example do you need? Any name with dot. user.name

[mfn]

Maybe we can add a comment here, something like:

Don't qualify the column if a . is found, in which case it's assume to be qualified already

I just hope (not an SQL expert here) it's not possible to have a actual column name with a dot ... in which case the worst output would be that the qualification wouldn't be performed and the user would have to do it manually 🤷‍♀️

[sisve]

Looks like this is missing quotations.

[JosephSilber]

Uh, what?

[sisve]

I mean quotations of the table name and the column name. We already have this available via Grammar::wrap().

[mfn]

Why would this suddenly be an issue? I mean I understand your idea, but this PR is only refactoring existing code doing exactly what this line does, nothing else.

I think if grammar shall be involved in this, it should be a separate PR anyway.

[taylorotwell]

We might want to rename this to something like qualifyColumn... I fear something as generic as qualify could have conflicts with user defined methods if we release it on 5.5. I like the idea though. Cleans up some repetitive code.

[JosephSilber]

@taylorotwell I changed it to qualifyColumn.

[reinink]

This is cool, nice addition. Sort of wish it was just column though, and I wish it could be called statically:

Group::whereHas('users', function ($query) {
    $query->whereNull(GroupUser::column('deleted_at'));
});

For now I've got around this by just adding this static method to my base class:

abstract class Model extends Eloquent
{
    public static function column($column)
    {
        return (new static())->qualifyColumn($column);
    }
}