Collections and Eager-Loading

The first place you’ll want to apply col­lec­tion sup­port is any­where you’re using eager load­ing. The result will be one block of code that you can use for both eager-loaded and lazy-loaded ele­ments, reduc­ing errors in your code, as well as code duplication.

Since ver­sion 2.6, Craft returns eager-loaded ele­ments as arrays, and we have to iter­ate over them as a stan­dard array. 

When eager load­ing an asset ele­ment, you’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with hav­ing to access the image itself via the index (entry.asset[0]) instead of via .one() since that .one() method isn’t avail­able on a stan­dard array.

You have to update your Twig code if you decide to eager load an ele­ment and it makes some code not reusable because if a query isn’t eager-load­ing the ele­ment, you can’t access it as an array via the index. 

So, how does the addi­tion of Lar­avel Col­lec­tions help with eager loading?

The code is more straight­for­ward and reusable.

Craft 4 returns all eager-loaded ele­ments as col­lec­tions instead of stan­dard data arrays. Because of this change, we don’t need to have a spe­cial case using an array index to access the element.