Error: forceDelete method doesnt exist - laravel-5.3

Question

Can you please explain me the following behavior?
public function kill($id)
{
$post = Post::withTrashed()->where('id',$id)->get();
$post->forceDelete();
return redirect()->back()->with('success','Post Deleted Succesfully');
}
The code results in this error:
forceDelete method doesnt exist
But the following code does not.
public function kill($id)
{
$post = Post::withTrashed()->where('id',$id)->first();
$post->forceDelete();
return redirect()->back()->with('success','Post Deleted Succesfully');
}
Could someone explain?

Answer 1

My Laravel knowledge is rusty and I am a Rails guy. I just landed on your post to review it if it needs any improvements.
Any ways... if I am correct...
You have 2 functions, let them be F1 and F2 respectively.
In F1, you are searching for a post with a specific ID. What you get is a collection proxy and not a Post. Thus it doesn't respond to forceDelete().
In F2, you are asking for the first object in the collection thus you are getting a Post object that responds to forceDelete().
To delete a collection you will be able to use the delete() function instead in some thing like
Post::withTrashed()->where('id',$id)->delete();

Answer 2

Actually it is pretty simple. As you indicated in the post,
$post = Post::withTrashed()->where('id',$id)->get();
$post->forceDelete();
gives error
while
$post = Post::withTrashed()->where('id',$id)->first();
$post->forceDelete();
doesnot. The reason as for my understanding is, $id is always unique. And it returns a single data (or single model) related to that particular id from the post table. In the first case where you are using get() method, what you are trying to return is a multiple row data, hence it will return a single data but in multi-dimensional array format. You can check that using dd() helper function.
In second case, you are using first() method, it always returns single row of data related to that particular $id, so forceDelete() method exists for that case(In other sense you can say that forceDelete exists only the single row data model, but not multiple data row model which you are tying to retrieve using get(). Remember get() always tries to return multiple data, and multiple data can only be held on array, so it gives array as a result although the result is only one.)
Hope this helps.

Answer 3

This is because when you user ->get() what you really have is a Laravel collection and there is no forceDelete() method on collection.
So you have to use ->first() or ->find() and eloquent will return the model and then you can use forceDelete on it.
For example:
$users->each(function ($user) {
$user->forcedelete();
});
Is is efficient way of doing this is another question. But it works.