Laravel returning multiple views - php

Question

I'm trying to return multiple views using the laravel framework. When I return the variable, it only makes it through the loop once, therefore only one comment is displayed on the page.
foreach($index_comments as $comments){
$commentComment = $comments->comment;
$index_children = NULL;
$getUser = DB::table('users')->where('id', '=', $comments->from_user_id)->get();
foreach ($getUser as $user) {
$firstName = $user->first_name;
$lastName = $user->last_name;
}
return View::make('feeds.comments')->with(array(
'firstName' => $firstName,
'lastName' => $lastName,
'commentComment' => $commentComment,
'index_children' => $index_children
));
}
I just need a way of returning multiple views.
Thanks for any help!
Toby.

Answer 1

It seems that you don't quite understand the concepts of Laravel and/or PHP yet. So let's start it from scratch: We want to fetch all comments, output the comment and the name of the user who wrote the comment.
At a very basic level, we can just grab it straight from the DB with the query builder:
public function showComments()
{
$commentData = DB::table('comments')
->join('users', 'users.id', '=', 'comments.from_user_id')
->get(['text', 'firstName', 'lastName']);
return View::make('feeds.comments')->with('commentData', $commentData)
}
And in your view:
#foreach($commentData as $comment)
{{ $comment->text }}
<br />
written by {{ $comment->firstName }} {{ $comment->lastName }}
<hr />
#endforeach
That's it. You don't return the view on each iteration, the iteration happens in the view. The return statement terminates the function execution immediately. If you return within in a loop, it will always exit upon the first iteration, that's why you're getting only one result.
In the next step, you should play around with Models and Eloquent for even more powerful and readable data handling.