[5.5] whereDoesntHave not taking optional nested relations into account

[bertheyman]

• Laravel Version: 5.5.39
• PHP Version: 7.1.1

Description:

Example: every book belongs to an optional subcategory, in turn belonging to a regular category.
We're trying to use the querybuilder to exclude books belonging to a category meeting certain conditions. (e.g. set to invisible)

$builder->whereDoesntHave('subcategory.category', function ($query) {
    $query->where('visible', 0);
})

The above example would not return a book without a subcategory.
However, this book doesn't have a related category set to visible = 0, so one would expect this book to turn up in the results.

I'm not sure if this is intended this way, but it sure confused me for some time. So either a fix, or a warning in the docs might be useful.

Steps To Reproduce:

Test the above query.
To work correctly, the model would need a corresponding subcategory.

*Please note: this is my first issue in the Laravel repo. Feedback is welcomed.

[staudenmeir]

I can see why you would expect a different behavior, but I don't think this will be changed. It would potentially break people's existing code and probably wouldn't be an easy fix.

[bertheyman]

Thanks for the feedback! Will give it a try.

[staudenmeir]

You were absolutely right, this is a bug. It will be fixed in the next release: #26228