Return only certain data in from a collection - Laravel - php

Question

I'm learning Laravel and have created a public endpoint where I want to output only certain information of some comments if a user is not authenticated from a GET request.
I have managed to filter out the comments based on whether or not they are approved. I now want to filter out the data that is returned. I have attached a screenshot of what is currently returned.
Ideally, I only want to return the id, name and the body in the json. How can I go about this? I tried the pluck() method which did not give the desired results. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated
public function index(Request $request)
{
if (Auth::guard('api')->check()) {
return Comment::all();
} else {
$comments = Comment::where('approved', 1)->get();
return $comments->pluck('id','name','body');
}
}

Answer 1

To select the particular columns, you can pass columns name to get as
$comments = Comment::where('approved', 1) -> get(['id','name','body']);

Answer 2

You can use a transformer to map the incoming data to a sensible output based on the auth state. The following example comes from the Fractal lib:
<?php
use Acme\Model\Book;
use League\Fractal;
$books = Book::all();
$resource = new Fractal\Resource\Collection($books, function(Book $book) {
return [
'id' => (int) $book->id,
'title' => $book->title,
'year' => $book->yr,
'author' => [
'name' => $book->author_name,
'email' => $book->author_email,
],
'links' => [
[
'rel' => 'self',
'uri' => '/books/'.$book->id,
]
]
];
});
Ideally, you would create 2 classes that extend from Transformer and pass the correct one to the output.

Answer 3

If you want to pass the result as json respose
$comments = Comment::where('approved', 1)->pluck('id','name','body')->toArray();
return Response::json($comments);
If you want to pass the result as to blade
$comments = Comment::where('approved', 1)->pluck('id','name','body')->toArray();
return view('your_blade_name')->with('comments',$comments);