Laravel Collection - Return Array of Objects - arrays

Question

So I am trying to return an array of objects with my Laravel collection using the following code:
/**
* View a user's chat rooms.
*
* return \Illuminate\Http\Response|\Laravel\Lumen\Http\ResponseFactory\
*/
public function viewChatRooms()
{
$user = Auth::user(); // #var User $user
$username = $user->username;
$rooms = Room::with('messages')->get()
->filter(function ($val) use ($username){
foreach ($val->users as $user) {
if($user === $username){
return $val;
}
}
});
return response(['rooms' => $rooms]);
}
Instead of returning an array of objects, the response returns the following:
{
"rooms": {
"0": {...},
"3": {...}
}
}
This is the desired result:
{
"rooms": [
{...},
{...}
]
}
Kind of stumped by this, could some one guide me in the right direction?

Answer 1

You Can use array_value function of PHP when returning response like this:
return response()->json([
'rooms' => array_values($rooms->toArray())
]);
Laravel Collection Methods for Getting only values of Collection
https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/collections#method-values
So
return response()->json([
'rooms' => $rooms->values()->toArray()
]);

Answer 2

The issue was that I didn't rebase the array since it skipped a few keys. I fixed it by simply using array_values() like so:
$rooms = Room::with('messages')->get()
->filter(function ($val) use ($username){
foreach ($val->users as $user) {
if($user === $username){
return $val;
}
}
});
return response(['rooms' => array_values($rooms->toArray())]);

Answer 3

I think that you will find that doing this within your DB query will be better performance wise.
Something like this:
$rooms = Room::whereHas('users', function(user) use ($username) {
return $user == $username
})
->with('messages')
->get();

Answer 4

To return an array of objects, you can use the all method.
Instead of returning a collection of objects, it returns an array of objects.
For example, User::all(); returns an Eloquent collection which is structured like so:
[
{App\User},
{App\User},
{App\User}
]
Whereas, the other answers suggest using ->toArray() which returns an array of arrays, not an array of objects, e.g.:
[
[
'id' => 123,
'name' => 'example'
...
],
[
...
]
]