Querying Dates and Date Parts in Laravel

The World War II timeline application allows users to query historical events by a specific date, by month/day combination, by a year, or they can leave everything blank and the system will show them events that had happened “on this day”. Here’s an example for 18 March 1944. To achieve this, in SQL speak, it would be something like the following.

-- By specific date
select * from my_table where my_date=:yyyymmdd;

-- By year
select * from my_table where date_format(my_date, '%Y')=:yyyy;

In Laravel’s This can be achieved with several Laravel Eloquent’s built in functions: whereDate(), whereYear(), whereMonth(), and whereDay(). Below are some examples from WW2DB’s TimelineController.

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\Timeline;

class TimelineController extends Controller {

	/* ... Unrelated code omitted from this article */

	public function getList(Request $request) {
		/* ... Unrelated code omitted from this article */

		$mm = $request->query('mm');
		$dd = $request->query('dd');
		$yyyy = $request->query('yyyy');
		
		$timeline = Timeline::orderBy('my_date');
		
		// If querying by specific date, use whereDate()
		$timeline = $timeline->whereDate('my_date', date($yyyy."-".$mm."-".$dd));
		
		// If querying by month/day, use whereMonth() + whereDay()
		$timeline = $timeline->whereMonth('my_date', $mm)
			->whereDay('my_date', $dd);

		// If querying by year, use whereYear()
		$timeline = $timeline->whereYear('my_date', $yyyy);
		
		$timeline = $timeline->get();
		
		return view('timeline.my_view', compact('timeline'));
	}

	/* ... Unrelated code omitted from this article */
}

Or, simplified whereMonth() + whereDay() example to get data for 18 March:

$mm = "03";
$dd = "18";
$timeline = Timeline::orderBy('my_date');		
$timeline = $timeline->whereMonth('my_date', $mm)
	->whereDay('my_date', $dd);
$timeline = $timeline->get();