Laravel 5.3 Check if result exist - php

Question

I'm having trouble getting this thing to work. Basically this function is called once I click the delete button of an user config. Users can have multiple configs. What happens is that once I delete a config it looks for another one, if found it sets that as the current profile. If not it should set the config_done back to 0. the first bit works fine but if $firstProfile returns nothing, instead of entering the else it returns me an error..
code:
public function delete(UserConfig $config) {
$user = Auth::user();
$uid = $user->id;
if ($uid == $config->user_id) {
UserConfig::where('id', $config->id)->delete();
$firstProfile = UserConfig::where('user_id', $uid)->first()->id;
if(count($firstProfile)){
$user = User::find($uid);
$user->current_profile = $firstProfile;
$user->save();
return view('/settings');
} else {
$user = User::find($uid);
$user->config_done = 0;
$user->save();
return view('/home');
}
}
}
error:
ErrorException in UserConfigController.php line 100:
Trying to get property of non-object
in UserConfigController.php line 100
at HandleExceptions->handleError('8', 'Trying to get property of non-object', '/Users/jordykoppen/git/beef-monitor/app/Http/Controllers/UserConfigController.php', '100', array('config' => object(UserConfig), 'user' => object(User), 'uid' => '1')) in UserConfigController.php line 100
Keep in mind that I'm very new to Laravel and the whole MVC environment.

Answer 1

Eloquent will return null if no result is found. You're dealing with objects here, so rather than checking the count, you can just do this.
$firstProfile = UserConfig::where('user_id', $uid)->first();
if($firstProfile){
// success
} else {
// not result
}
The $firstProfile variable will either be an instance of UserConfig or it will be null, no need to check the count.