Laravel trying to save $appends attributes

Question

I am coding on Laravel 6, and stumbled up on this problem. I have accessors for a field that i need in my model in some cases, but it does not exist in my database. As i read in documentation, the variable $appends make the field in question to be serialized with the model, but not saved in database.

Then, when i update or save entries of the specific model in database, Laravel gives me back an error saying that field x is not present in field list. I searched here, googled a lot, but didn't found any answer.

This pluggable_data field is not sent by client-side. I create it on server-side because i need its information to do some tasks. But it is not relevant enough to create a column in DB just to store it.

Model

    /**
     * @var array|null
     */
    protected $appends = [
        'pluggable_data'
    ];

    /**
     * @param array $pluggableData
     */
    public function setPluggableDataAttribute(array $pluggableData)
    {
        $this->attributes['pluggable_data'] = $pluggableData;
    }

    /**
     * @return array
     */
    public function getPluggableDataAttribute(): array
    {
        return $this->attributes['pluggable_data'] ?? []; //  Sometimes there is no pluggable data, then i return an empty array
    }

Where the error occurs

    $activity->setRegisterDate($fields['register_date']);
    $activity->setExtraAttribute($fields['extra']);
    $activity->update(); <----- Here

    return $activity;

The error: SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'pluggable_data' in 'field list'

Summarizing what i want (in case that you have a better idea): i want a field that will be present in model serializations, even if it is an empty array, but that does not be saved on database.

Answer 1

As @nay said in the comments, all i had to do was to replace the $this->attributes['pluggable_data'] by a real variable, like $this->pluggable_data. This way, Laravel will not think that it is a database column