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10 Hidden Laravel Eloquent Features You May Not Know

Posted by Jino Antony on 2019-01-21

Laravel is a feature-rich framework. However, you cannot find all the available features in the official documentation. Here are some features that you may not know.

  1. Get original attributes

After mutating an Eloquent record you can get the original attributes by calling getOriginal()

$user = App\User::first();
$user->name;                   //John

$user->name = "Peter";         //Peter

$user->getOriginal('name');    //John
$user->getOriginal();          //Original $user record
  1. Check if Model changed

Determine if the model or given attribute have been modified using isDirty()

$user = App\User::first();
$user->isDirty();          //false

$user->name = "Peter";
$user->isDirty();          //true

You can also check if a particular attribute is changed.

$user->isDirty('name');    //true
$user->isDirty('age');     //false
  1. Get changed attributes

Retrieve the changed attributes of a model using getChanges()

$user->getChanges()

[
    "name" => "Peter",
]

Note: Changes will reflect only if you save the model or sync the changes using syncChanges()

  1. Custom deleted_at column

By default, Laravel handles soft deletes using deleted_at column. You can change this by explicitly defining the DELETED_AT property.

class User extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes;

    /**
     * The name of the "deleted at" column.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    const DELETED_AT = 'is_deleted';
}

Or by defining an accessor.

class User extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes;

    public function getDeletedAtColumn()
    {
        return 'is_deleted';
    }
}
  1. Save models and relationships

You can save a model and its corresponding relationships using the push() method.

class User extends Model
{
    public function phone()
    {
        return $this->hasOne('App\Phone');
    }
}

$user = User::first();
$user->name = "Peter";

$user->phone->number = '1234567890';

$user->push(); // This will update both user and phone record in DB
  1. Reload fresh model

Reload a fresh model instance from the database using fresh()

$user = App\User::first();
$user->name;               // John

// user record get updated by another thread. eg: 'name' changed to // Peter.

$updatedUser = $user->fresh();
$updatedUser->name;       // Peter

$user->name;              // John
  1. Reload existing model

You can reload an existing model with fresh values from database using refresh()

$user = App\User::first();
$user->name;               // John

// user record get updated by another thread. eg: 'name' changed to // Peter.

$user->refresh();
$user->name;              // Peter

Note: refresh() will also update the loaded relations of the existing model.

  1. Check if models are the same

Determine if two models have the same ID and belong to the same table using is()

$user = App\User::find(1);
$sameUser = App\User::find(1);
$diffUser = App\User::find(2);

$user->is($sameUser);       // true
$user->is($diffUser);       // false
  1. Clone a model

You can clone a model using replicate(). It will create a copy of the model into a new, non-existing instance.

$user = App\User::find(1);
$newUser = $user->replicate();

$newUser->save();
  1. Specify attributes in find() method

When using find() or findOrFail() methods you can specify the attributes to select as the second argument.

$user = App\User::find(1, ['name', 'age']);

$user = App\User::findOrFail(1, ['name', 'age']);