OctoberCMS Should this throw an error? - laravel

Question

If I (incorrectly) define a belongsToMany as follows (Note the ] after the table key):
public $belongsToMany = [
'phonetypes' => [
'NigglesLogic\Suitespots\Models\Phonetype',
'table' => 'niggleslogic_suitespots_contact_phonetypes'],
'pivot' => ['phone_number']
];
I can view the page and no error is thrown. However the pivot data does not show.
If I change the above to this (with the ] after the pivot key, where I intended it to be):
public $belongsToMany = [
'phonetypes' => [
'NigglesLogic\Suitespots\Models\Phonetype',
'table' => 'niggleslogic_suitespots_contact_phonetypes',
'pivot' => ['phone_number']
]
];
The pivot data is shown when I refresh the page.
I realize that I made a typing error but I should OctoberCMS at least warn me about this situation?

Answer 1

Hmm, code structure of October CMS mostly check configuration and if its not correctly formatted then it ignore that thing.
Why ? : Because October CMS is based on Laravel and all the relational configuration is passed to the Laravel then it will initialize relations.
so it's really hard to predict what kind of mistake user will made, it's rather easy to just use key which needed for configuration and ignore rest.
So in your case: (I have rewritten your code in proper structure)
public $belongsToMany = [
'phonetypes' => [
'NigglesLogic\Suitespots\Models\Phonetype',
'table' => 'niggleslogic_suitespots_contact_phonetypes'
],
'pivot' => ['phone_number']
];
You can see that after restructuring it looks like we have defined 2 relations, one is phonetypes and other pivot, so when we try to fetch one of them
in first case [phonetypes] : it can not find proper relational data from table, but table exists so it returns null not an error
in second case [pivot] : we are not using it as we dont consider it as relation, still if we try to use it, it will not find table phone_number so it may throw an error.
for detecting error we need something like more predictable behavior.
[ Yes October CMS could show you a warning but to show that warning they need to write more code and it seems code size get double if they check everything :( ]
(we can not show warning for this) for ex if we define route:
Route::get('/som-item', function() { ...code... })
see, I mistakenly write /som-item but but, I need to use /some-item url so laravel can not able to give me warning about this as its correct route for it, it will show me that /some-item not defined error BUT it will not tell me that dude you did spelling mistake kind of WARNING :).
[ we don't see warning until we get some AI in code :) ]