Laravel query builder returns object or array?

Question

I'm building a very simple web app with Laravel.

I've built two separate Controllers, which each return two separate views, as follows:

ProfileController:

class ProfileController extends BaseController {

    public function user($name)
    {
        $user = User::where('name', '=', $name);

        if ($user->count())
        {
            $user = $user->first();
            $workout = DB::table('workouts')->where('user_id', '=', $user->id)->get();

            Return View::make('profile')
                    ->with('user', $user)
                    ->with('workout', $workout);
        }

        return App::abort(404);
    }
}

WorkoutController:

class WorkoutController extends BaseController {

    public function workout($name)
    {
        $workout = DB::table('workouts')->where('name', '=', $name)->first();

        if ($workout)
        {
            Return View::make('add-exercise')
                    ->with('workout', $workout);
        }

        return App::abort(404);
    }
}

What is confusing me is what I had to do in order to pass a single workout object to each view. As you might have noticed the query builders for workout are different:

$workout = DB::table('workouts')->where('user_id', '=', $user->id)->get();

and

$workout = DB::table('workouts')->where('name', '=', $name)->first();

On the profile view, I get an object using the ->get(); method, but on the add-exercise view, I must use ->first(); or I will otherwise get an array with only one index, where I can then access the object, i.e. $workout[0]->name instead of $workout->name.

Why is this? Shouldn't I be able to use either get and/or first in both controllers and expect the same type of result from both since I want the same thing from the same table?

Answer 1

get() returns a collection of objects every time. That collection may have 0 or more objects in it, depending on the results of the query.

first() calls get() under the hood, but instead of returning the collection of results, it returns the first entry in the collection (if there is one).

Which method you use depends on what you need. Do you need the collection of all the results (use get()), or do you just want the first result in the collection (use first())?