Laravel : How to Pass an attribute to Eloquent model constructor - laravel

Question

I want to use strtolower() before saving data in database for 5 attributes,
I'm using this code in Model
public function setFirstNameAttribute($value)
{
$this->attributes['firstName'] = strtolower($value);
}
public function setLastNameAttribute($value)
{
$this->attributes['lastName'] = strtolower($value);
}
public function setUserNameAttribute($value)
{
$this->attributes['userName'] = strtolower($value);
}
... etc
Can I use the __construct method instead of the above code?

Answer 1

There are two ways first one, to use boot method directly (preferred for small changes in model like in your question)
Method 1 :
we can directly use the boot method,
<?php
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Mymodel extends Model
{
public static function boot()
{
parent::boot();
static::saving(function ($model) {
// Remember that $model here is an instance of MyModel
$model->firstName = strtolower($model->firstName);
$model->lastName = strtolower($model->lastName);
$model->userName = strtolower($model->userName);
// ...... other attributes
});
}
}
Method 2 :
So we can use here a simple trait with a simple method for generating a strtolower() for a string.This is preferred when you have to do bigger changes in your model while performing operations in model like saving, creating etc. Or even if you want to use the same property in multiple models.
Create a trait MyStrtolower
<?php
namespace App\Traits;
trait MyStrtolower
{
public function mystrtolower($string)
{
return strtolower($string);
}
}
We can now attach this trait to any class that we want to have the mystrtolower method.
<?php
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\Traits\MyStrtolower;
class Mymodel extends Model
{
use MyStrtolower; // Attach the MyStrtolower trait to the model
public static function boot()
{
parent::boot();
static::saving(function ($model) {
// Remember that $model here is an instance of MyModel
$model->firstName = $model->mystrtolower($model->firstName);
$model->lastName = $model->mystrtolower($model->lastName);
$model->userName = $model->mystrtolower($model->userName);
// ...... other attributes
});
}
}
If you want to not repeat all these lines of code for every model you make, make the trait configurable using abstract methods so that you can dynamically pass the attribute names for which you want to lower case string, like employee_name is Employee Model and user_name in User Model.