Extending Laravel's base model

Question

In Laravel all models extend the base model.

The laravel eloquent models have a protected array attribute called $dates. Every date that is being added to this array is automatically converted to a Carbon instance.

I would like to extend the base model with similar functionality. For example with a protected $times attribute. All the time attributes would be converted to a Carbon instance

How would you do this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Thats easy whatever you want to do. Basic PHP knowledge.

If you want to add some other fields to be converted to Carbon instances, simply add them to $dates array

If you want to add some new parameters just extend laravel's Model as shown below

<?php
namespace App;

class MyModel extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model
{

    protected $awesomness = [];

    /**
     *  override method
     *
     */
    public function getAttributeValue($key)
    {
        $value = $this->getAttributeFromArray($key);

        // If the attribute has a get mutator, we will call that then return what
        // it returns as the value, which is useful for transforming values on
        // retrieval from the model to a form that is more useful for usage.
        if ($this->hasGetMutator($key))
        {
            return $this->mutateAttribute($key, $value);
        }

        // If the attribute exists within the cast array, we will convert it to
        // an appropriate native PHP type dependant upon the associated value
        // given with the key in the pair. Dayle made this comment line up.
        if ($this->hasCast($key))
        {
            return $this->castAttribute($key, $value);
        }

        // If the attribute is listed as a date, we will convert it to a DateTime
        // instance on retrieval, which makes it quite convenient to work with
        // date fields without having to create a mutator for each property.
        if (in_array($key, $this->getDates()) && !is_null($value))
        {
            return $this->asDateTime($value);
        }

        //
        //
        // that's the important part of our modification
        //
        //
        if (in_array($key, $this->awesomness) && !is_null($value))
        {
            return $this->doAwesomness($value);
        }

        return $value;
    }

    public function doAwesomness($value)
    {
        //do whatever you want here
        return $value;
    }

}

Then all of your models just need to extend \App\MyModel class instead of \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model