Laravel protected attributes and Mutators

Question

I have some problem with laravel and protected $attributes and mutators.

I have user ranking with points. I want add to User Model another attribution with ranking Position.

In user model I have public function like this:

public function getRankPositionAttribute(){
    $userPoints= Ranking::where('user_id','=',$this->id)->first();
    $userPosition = Ranking::where('points','>',$userPoints->points)->count()+1;
    return $userPosition;
    }

I also set:

 protected $attributes = array('RankPosition'='');

But it's not working (I don't see value like RankPosition in attributes). Strange thing is that when I add (for example) value like this:

protected $attributes =array('test'=>'yes'); 

Laravel also don't see test...

But when I add this:

protected $appends = array('RankPosition');

and in my controller I find all user and get response to json then in json response i see value like RankPosition with the correct value... :(

What Im doing wrong? Why "my laravel" skips protected $attributes?

Please help me.

Answer 1

This is because if you provide protected $attributes in your class then Laravel doesn't override it when the source of attributes are the table . Here the source of $attributes is database column.

But when you do something like this:

$user = new User;

then you will see a test attribute.

So to dynamically adding the attributes you should use appends property on the model.