Laravel 4 - json decoding in view

Question

I recently experimented with Laravel 4, which so far has been a joy to use. However, I am experiencing a problem, not with Laravel 4, but rather my own insecurities.

I have a database containing 3 rows with 4 columns. For example, let's say that the columns are:

content_id, Content Type, content_data, timestamp

The column 'content_data' contains a JSON encoded array of approximately four key pairs.

When I retrieve these rows from the database (using Eloquent) and pass the data into my view, how can I also parse JSON in my click template?

After searching and accessing the Laravel documentation, my thought is that you cannot, so I tried to decode the JSON back into an array inside my controller, and then pass it to my view.

So far I have tried the following in my class:

<?php
class PageController extends \BaseController {

public function index()
{

    $data = Content::
        ->where('content_type', 1)
        ->get();

    foreach($data as $content)
    {
        $items[] = json_decode($content->content_data);
    }

    return View::make('pages.page2')
        ->with('data', $data)
        ->with('items', $items);
}
}

However, in my Blade template, when I run the foreach loop to loop through the selected lines, I tried to run another foreach loop in the first one, which iterates over the $ items array to retrieve their values, but since it is a loop in the loop, I get duplicate json values.

My clip template looks like this:

@extends('layouts.pages');

@section('content_body')
<h1>My <span>title</span></h1>

<div class="column col-1">
    <ul>
        {{-- loop through the database rows --}}
        @foreach($data as $row)

            {{-- loop through the json decoded values --}}
            @foreach($items as $item)

                {{ $item['title'] }}

            @endforeach

        @endforeach
    </ul>
</div>
@stop

Not sure if I explained this correctly, but basically I just want to be able to parse my encoded json array in a loop that displays the extracted db lines

I hope this makes sense to anyone who can help.

Answer 1

Eloquent Accessor, .

/**
 * Eloquent accessor to transform our content_data column
 * from JSON to an array.
 * 
 * @param  string  $data  Original JSON data
 * @return array
 */
public function getContentDataAttribute($data)
{
    return json_decode($data);
}

$content->content_data, , .

, JSON, .