Question

I have a controller where I want to combine data from multiple tables with parallel structures. What I want to end up with in the end is one object I can return from the controller so I can parse it in Backbone.

I want to do something like this:

public function index()
{
    $mc = MainContact::where('verified', '=', '1')->get();
    $sm = SendMessage::where('verified', '=', '1')->get();

    $obj = (object) array_merge((array) $mc, (array) $sm);
    return $obj;
}

I’m told by another post on StackOverflow that this works in PHP 5.3+. However, this returns the following error in Laravel:

UnexpectedValueException: The Response content must be a string or object implementing
 __toString(), "object" given.

How do I implement this method in Laravel? Both $mc and sm return valid objects in Laravel.

Answer 1

What you can do here is merge the arrays of the two query result and then use the Response with json output like shown below.

$array = array_merge($mc->toArray(), $sm->toArray());
return Response::json($array);