What's New features and improvements in Laravel 6
With every new version, Laravel has huge update that is very typical with other young framework. Laravel 6 comes with fresh website design along with new improvements with lazy collections, eloquent subquery additions and many more.
September 3rd, 2019 is the release date of Laravel 6.
I am going to list some new features that has been introduced with Laravel 6.
Lazy CollectionsLazy collection is a class that provides an iterators to iterate on the items of array. It is basically designed for keep memory usage low by the application.
Let's take an example of the application where you will have to work with large database and you need to fetch thousands/lakhs records for specific reason may be for the excel file in order to generate reports and if you run Laravel Eloquent all() method then most possibly it will throw out of memory exception because it fetch all the records and store into the memory.
To solve this problem, Laravel 6 come up with powerful solution query builder’s cursor method that returns a LazyCollection instance.
$users = App\User::cursor();
foreach ($users as $user) {
# code...
}
You can also use the lazy collection to filter data from the collection class :
$users = App\User::cursor()->filter(function ($user) {
return $user->id > 100;
});
foreach ($users as $user) {
# code...
}
Filter callback function will execute only when we iterate the each user.
String & Array Helpers PackageEarlier you have had the access of the string and array helpers method in Laravel application by default but with Laravel 6, All str_ and array_ helpers have been moved to the new laravel/helpers Composer package and removed from the framework.
You can use these helper methods in Laravel 6 by running the following composer command :
composer require laravel/helpers
If you don't install the package for helper then you will get following type of errors :
Call to undefined function str_ or Call to undefined function array_Eliminated Carbon 1.x version and added Carbon 2.0
Carbon 1.x has been removed from Laravel 6 and now Carbon 2 is officially supported by Laravel. Laravel 6 does not provide any support for the 1.x release of Carbon.
The BelongsTo::update MethodThis is one of the new features in Laravel 6, It gives you mass assignment protection on belongs to update method.
If you want to update a model attached via a BelongsTo relationship and you get mass assignment update protection and events then you should call the update method in following way :
/* Without mass assignment protection */ $article->user()->update(['foo' => 'bar']); /* With mass assignment protection */ $article->user->update(['foo' => 'bar']);Eloquent Subquery Enhancements
Laravel adds support for subqueries to both select and addSelect query methods.
Let's take an example of a user table and a post table. User will contains multiple post and I have to select all of the users and their recent post using a single eloquent query :
return User::addSelect(['last_post' => Post::select('title')
->whereColumn('user_id', 'users.id')
->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')
->limit(1)
])->get();
This is really an awesome feature that will help you a lot where you need to write subquery.
You can also do the same job with query builder :
return User::addSelect(['last_post' => function ($query) {
$query->select('title')
->from('posts')
->whereColumn('user_id', 'users.id')
->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')
->limit(1);
}])->get();
Considering performance optimizations, the integer type key is best solution for primary key. Laravel 6 has updates to set primary key on your model so if you are using string as model's primary key, you can declare it using the $keyType property on your model.
/** * The "type" of the primary key ID. * * @var string */ protected $keyType = 'string';
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