John Davidson

Message:

In my Laravel 8 project I have a model called Campaign, my front-end though is build in Vue JS so needs to have some keys on a Campaign for contextual purposes, such as opening and closing a dropdown menu when looping over the elements, a database column isn't nessecery for this.

I'd like to add some default key/value pairs to my Campaign model, for example: dropdown_is_open and should have a default value of false.

I came across the default attributes for a model and tried adding this but cannot see my new key on the object, what am I missing?

<?php



namespace App\Models;



use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;



class Campaign extends Model

{

    use HasFactory, SoftDeletes;



    /**

     * Indicates if the model's ID is auto-incrementing.

     *

     * @var bool

     */

    public $incrementing = false;



    /**

    * The table associated with the model.

    *

    * @var string

    */

    protected $table = 'campaigns';



    /**

     * The attributes that are mass assignable.

     *

     * @var array<int, string>

     */

    protected $fillable = [

        'campaign',

        'template'

    ];



    /**

     * The model's default values for attributes.

     *

     * @var array

     */

    protected $attributes = [

        'dropdown_is_open' => false

    ];

}

Index function in controller:

/**

 * Display a listing of the resource.

 *

 * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response

 */

public function index()

{

    $campaigns = Campaign::where('user_id', Auth::id())

                         ->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')

                         ->get();



    if (!$campaigns) {

        return response()->json([

            'message' => "You have no campaigns"

        ], 404);

    }



    return response()->json([

        'campaigns' => $campaigns

    ], 200);

}

I expect to see:

{

  campaign: 'my campaign',

  template: '',

  dropdown_is_open: false <-- my key

}

Previously I was doing a foreach in my index function and adding the contextual keys on each item, but this would only show for the index function and I'd have to add it everywhere.

---

My Answer:
To access the default key/value pair in your Campaign model, you need to make sure that the key is included in the $fillable array. This is because Laravel's mass assignment protection only allows attributes listed in the $fillable array to be mass assigned.

So, in your Campaign model, update the $fillable array to include the 'dropdown_is_open' key like this:

php
/**
* The attributes that are mass assignable.
*
* @var array
*/
protected $fillable = [
'campaign',
'template',
'dropdown_is_open'
];


By adding 'dropdown_is_open' to the $fillable array, you should now be able to access the default key/value pair in your Campaign model.