Inconsistent orWhere behavior after upgrade from Laravel 10.x to 13.x

[JakeBooher]

Laravel Version

v13.2.0

PHP Version

8.3.30

Database Driver & Version

mariadb Ver 15.1 on arm64 (Homebrew)

Description

When doing something along the lines of:

$query
                        ->where([
                            ['source_type', '=', Role::class],
                            ['source_id', '=', $obj->guestRole->id],
                        ])
                        ->orWhere([
                            ['source_type', '=', Group::class],
                            ['source_id', '=', $obj->loggedOutGroup->id],
                        ]);

previously, it would generate a conditional with:

(source_type=? AND source_id=?) OR (source_type=? AND source_id=?)

After the upgrade to Laravel 13 it's now generating the following conditional (note the OR in the second block):

(source_type=? AND source_id=?) OR (source_type=? OR source_id=?)

While looking into this I discovered #53184 from 11.28 causing this issue. However, it says it was fixed in #53197 but I'm still seeing this behavior in 13.x

Steps To Reproduce

$query
                        ->where([
                            ['source_type', '=', Role::class],
                            ['source_id', '=', $obj->guestRole->id],
                        ])
                        ->orWhere([
                            ['source_type', '=', Group::class],
                            ['source_id', '=', $obj->loggedOutGroup->id],
                        ]);

Use this as a conditional

[JakeBooher]

On second look at that issue it looks like maybe I misunderstood, and it was intended to keep the new behavior? If that's the case it probably should be added to the laravel 11.x upgrade guide as a breaking change: https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/upgrade

[github-actions]

Thank you for reporting this issue!

As Laravel is an open source project, we rely on the community to help us diagnose and fix issues as it is not possible to research and fix every issue reported to us via GitHub.

If possible, please make a pull request fixing the issue you have described, along with corresponding tests. All pull requests are promptly reviewed by the Laravel team.

Thank you!

[crynobone]

Feel free to submit PR to the documentation repository

[scabarcas17]

This is the documented behavior since PR #53147 (shipped in Laravel 11.28). The intent there was to make the array-of-arrays syntax behave consistently with the associative-array syntax: when the outer call is orWhere(...), the boolean or is propagated to the inner conditions of the group as well. This was kept deliberately by the maintainer in #53197 over a full revert.

The behavior you observed in v13.2.0:

$query
    ->where([
        ['source_type', '=', Role::class],
        ['source_id', '=', $obj->guestRole->id],
    ])
    ->orWhere([
        ['source_type', '=', Group::class],
        ['source_id', '=', $obj->loggedOutGroup->id],
    ]);

produces:

where (source_type = ? and source_id = ?) or (source_type = ? or source_id = ?)

To get the AND-inside-the-group behavior you had on Laravel 10/11.27, use a closure — this is also what the docs already recommend for grouping orWhere:

$query
    ->where([
        ['source_type', '=', Role::class],
        ['source_id', '=', $obj->guestRole->id],
    ])
    ->orWhere(function ($query) use ($obj) {
        $query
            ->where('source_type', '=', Group::class)
            ->where('source_id', '=', $obj->loggedOutGroup->id);
    });

This is fully predictable and unaffected by the addArrayOfWheres boolean propagation.

That said, this is a real footgun and the docs don't mention it. I'm opening a docs PR at laravel/docs to clarify the behavior in queries.md so future readers don't get bitten by this when upgrading. Linking it here once it's up.