I just pushed up a PR to CodeIgniter as a quality-of-life upgrade: a new "when()" method. This allows you to conditionally modify a query based on the truthiness of the given condition. Without breaking the chain.

For example, say you need to filter users based on an HTTP query var.

    $status = service('request')->getPost('status');

    $users = $this->db->table('users')
       ->when($status, static function ($query, $status) {
           $query->where('status', $status);
       })
       ->get();

Nice and simple. You can also give it a closure to run when the condition evaluates to false:

$onlyInactive = service('request')->getPost('return_inactive');

$users = $this->db->table('users')
   ->when($onlyInactive, static function ($query, $onlyInactive) {
       $query->where('status', 'inactive');
   }, static function ($query) {
       $query->where('status', 'active');
   })
   ->get();

Those of you who have used Laravel in the past will recognize this feature. It is such a handy thing that cleans up your code I thought we should borrow the feature.

What other quality-of-life improvements would you like to see in CodeIgniter?

#codeigniter