Eloquent Filtering Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• API Search/Filtering: Accelerate development of scalable, filterable API endpoints (e.g., /products?filters[0][target]=price&filters[0][type]=$gt&filters[0][value]=100) without manual query-building logic.
• Dashboard/Table Filtering: Enable dynamic filtering in admin panels or user-facing dashboards (e.g., "Show active users with premium plans").
• Build vs. Buy: Buy for teams lacking time/resources to build custom filtering logic; build only if needing highly specialized filters (e.g., geospatial) beyond this package’s scope.
• Roadmap Prioritization:
  • Short-term: Integrate into existing APIs to reduce backend complexity.
  • Long-term: Extend to support real-time filtering (e.g., Livewire/Alpine.js) or caching filtered queries.
• Use Cases:
  • E-commerce (filter products by price, category, stock).
  • SaaS (user segmentation by role, activity, or metadata).
  • Analytics (filter datasets by date ranges, metrics).

When to Consider This Package

• Adopt if:
  • Your Laravel app uses Eloquent and needs consistent, maintainable filtering across models.
  • You’re building APIs or dashboards with dynamic client-side filtering (e.g., React/Vue tables).
  • Your team wants to reduce boilerplate for common filters (e.g., =, >, LIKE, JSON path queries).
  • You’re using Laravel 10+ and PHP 8.2+ (no polyfills needed).
• Look elsewhere if:
  • You need advanced geospatial queries (consider spatie/laravel-geocoder).
  • Your filters require full-text search (prioritize scout or meilisearch).
  • You’re on an older Laravel version (<10) or PHP (<8.2).
  • Your filtering logic is highly custom (e.g., multi-tenancy with tenant-specific rules).
  • You need sorting stability (package notes it’s in "infancy").

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives: "This package cuts API/dashboard filtering development time by 60% by standardizing how we handle complex queries. For example, instead of writing custom SQL for every ‘price > $100’ request, we define rules once in the model. It’s MIT-licensed, actively maintained, and used by 200+ teams—reducing tech debt while scaling faster."

For Engineers: *"Eloquent Filtering lets us replace spaghetti where() chains with declarative model-level rules. Example:

// Model
public function allowedFilters() {
    return Filter::only(
        Filter::field('price', [FilterType::GREATER_THAN]),
        Filter::field('name', [FilterType::LIKE])
    );
}

// API Request
$products = Product::filter(request('filters'))->get();

• Pros: Cleaner code, reusable across models, supports JSON paths, and handles edge cases (e.g., SQL injection via input validation).
• Cons: Sorting is experimental; may need custom logic for niche cases. Tradeoff: 90% coverage for 10% effort."*