Extending Laravel's base model - laravel-5

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