Populating a dropdown menu with database results in Laravel 4

Question

I'm trying to populate a drop down menu with database results in Laravel 4. I'm extremely new to Laravel. This is actually my first site and I'm learning as I go. So, please tell me if I'm using the wrong terminology or not enough information. I've got a database of company info and I need users to be able to choose a company from a dropdown. Or if the company isn't in the database to add it. For the select menu, it needs to go like this: [company name result] And I'm using this code in my controller: ``` $companies = RecordCompany::get(); $company_selector = array(); foreach($companies as $company) { $company_selector[$company->id] = $company->id; $company_selector[$company->company_name] = $company->company_name; } return View::make('admin.record_new', array('company_selector' => $company_selector)); ``` And this is what I've got in my view: ``` @if(count($client_selector)>0) {{ Form::select('company_id', $company_selector, array_values($company_selector)[0]) }} @endif ``` Disclaime…

Accepted Answer

In order to populate a dropdown menu with all the records from the RecordCompany model, you can do the following, in your view:

```
{{ Form::select('company_id', RecordCompany::lists('company_name', 'id')) }}
```

Note: In Laravel 5, the method `lists` has been deprecated. Use `pluck` instead.

Explanation of the code:

- The `Form::select` methods creates a HTML select tag.

- `company_id` is the name of the select tag.

- The second parameter is the options for the select tag. The `lists` method in any model (RecordCompany in this case) generates an associative array containing the parameters passed to that method (`id` and `company_name` in this case) of all the records in the model's database table.

If you want, you can also call the `lists` method from the controller and then pass the value to the view, like following:

In Controller

```
$company_lists = RecordCompany::lists('company_name', 'id');

return View::make('admin.record_new', array('company_lists' => $company_lists));
```

In View

```
{{ Form::select('company_id', $company_lists) }}
```

You can view the Laravel 4 documentation for generating a drop down list here: http://laravel.com/docs/html#drop-down-lists

Populating a dropdown menu with database results in Laravel 4

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