PHP 8.2 - Difficulties with Lazy Loading of Eloquent Relationships in Laravel 10
I'm maintaining legacy code that I'm stuck trying to I'm getting frustrated with This might be a silly question, but I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. I am experiencing an scenario with lazy loading of relationships in Laravel 10 while using PHP 8.2. I have a `User` model that has a `posts` relationship, and I am trying to access the posts for a user in a view. The question arises when I try to iterate over the posts, as I am getting an unexpected `null` value for the posts instead of an empty collection when a user has no posts. Here’s a simplified version of the code: ```php // User.php (Model) class User extends Model { public function posts() { return $this->hasMany(Post::class); } } // In the controller $user = User::find(1); return view('user.profile', compact('user')); ``` In my view, I am doing the following: ```blade // user/profile.blade.php <h1>{{ $user->name }}</h1> <h2>Posts:</h2> <ul> @foreach ($user->posts as $post) { <li>{{ $post->title }}</li> @endforeach </ul> ``` Instead of getting an empty list when there are no posts, I receive an behavior: `Trying to access array offset on value of type null`. I’ve checked the database and confirmed that the user exists but has no posts. The scenario seems to be that the relationship is not returning an empty collection as expected. I have already tried using `withCount()` to check the number of posts, and that works fine: ```php $user = User::withCount('posts')->find(1); ``` This returns `posts_count` as `0`, but accessing `$user->posts` still gives the `null` behavior. I’ve also tried explicitly defining the relationship in different ways, like adding a `return $this->hasMany(Post::class)->withDefault();` but it doesn’t resolve the scenario. Is there a configuration I might have missed or an alternative approach that could solve this question? Any insights would be appreciated! I'm working on a service that needs to handle this. My development environment is Ubuntu 22.04. My team is using Php for this CLI tool. What's the best practice here? This is part of a larger microservice I'm building. Any pointers in the right direction?