Model name: listing;
Field name: contact_name.
User input involved, so I want to format the output, consistently, with some variant of getContactName, i.e. any call to $model->contact_name returns the formatted output. Yes, I can use, for example, getContactName and $model->contactName, but I have not found any variant of getcontact_name that will work with the default $model->contact_name.
I'm aware that I could configure Gii to create some additional functions, and various other workarounds, but I'm interested, after a decent Google, in whether there is a straightforward solution.
getContact_name() will not work if you already have attribute (or regular object property) with contact_name as a name. Attributes from database have precedence over getters/setters - you can see this in __get() source code. And obviously __get() will never be called if you have real property with this name. So value will be searched in this order:
You should either use different name (contactName), or do formatting using afterFind event or override __get() to change order of data sources (this could be tricky). You may be also interested in this PR.