Using the @forelse blade directive

There are many great blade directives made available by the Laravel framework. Every new release I read the documentation in full to see if there are any cool new hidden features I can use.

One that I find useful a lot is the @forelse directive, and this is made specifically when you have a foreach loop inside a if/else statement.

As one example, I find them useful in rendering simple tables from models.

Without @forelse

 1// Assume we are inside a <table>'s <tbody> element
 2 
 3@if ($users->count())
 4    @foreach($users as $user)
 5        <tr>
 6            <td>{{ $user->name }}</td>
 7            ...
 8        </tr>
 9    @endforeach
10@else
11    <tr><td colspan="...">No users found.</td></tr>
12@endif

There is nothing wrong with the above code at all, but if you're the type of person that likes to minimize directives and indenting as I do, then @forelse is a little more syntactically pleasing.

With @forelse

 1// Assume we are inside a <table>'s <tbody> element
 2 
 3@forelse($users as $user)
 4    <tr>
 5        <td>{{ $user->name }}</td>
 6        ...
 7    </tr>
 8@empty
 9    <tr><td colspan="...">No users found.</td></tr>
10@endforelse

As you can see we removed the if directive and merged it with the foreach. We then use the @empty directive to act as the else when there are not items to iterate through.