How Laravel's optional() helper can keep your pages running

If you've ever used Laravel ORM to create a relationship between tables you will have come across the following problem at some point. Let's say you have a posts table and a users table.

When displaying posts you would show the user who created the post something like:

{{ $post->user->name }}

That's assuming there has been a user() method defined within the post model.

Now if a user was deleted or was missing from the post table you would get an exception when viewing the page. Far from ideal. If only there was a way for silently fail and let the page carry on displaying.

Thankfully there is! the optional() helper. This helper can be wrapped around the relationship call and will fail silently if there is an error otherwise the relationship will show as expected.

{{ optional($post->user)->name }}

Notice the column being displayed is after the closing parenthesis.

This only that in place you have the piece of mind the page will show even if one of your relationships fail.