Why Does My Laravel 5.2 Eloquent Model\'s String Primary Key Become 0?

Laravel 5.2: Resolving Primary Key Loss When Using a String

When attempting to use a custom string as the primary key for an Eloquent table in Laravel 5.2, the primary key value might surprisingly turn to 0. This behavior can be puzzling and frustrating.

Let's delve into the problem and find a solution:

Problem Description

You have a table with a string-based primary key, and you're using Eloquent to interact with the database. When you retrieve a record using first() based on the primary key, the primary key value becomes 0 in the resulting object.

Root Cause

The issue lies in Laravel's default behavior for auto-incrementing primary keys. By default, Laravel assumes the primary key to be an integer. When retrieving attributes from the model, it checks if the corresponding column should be cast as an integer. Since your primary key is a string, this casting process changes the value to 0.

Solution

To resolve this issue, you need to explicitly specify that your primary key is not auto-incrementing and should be treated as a string. To do this, add the following lines to your Eloquent model class:

protected $primaryKey = 'your_key_name';  // Your primary key name
public $incrementing = false;  // Disable auto-incrementing

For Laravel 6.0 and above:

In addition to the above, you also need to set the $keyType property to 'string':

protected $keyType = 'string';

With these settings, Laravel will correctly treat your primary key as a string and prevent the erroneous casting to integer.

Additional Considerations

Timestamps:

If your table doesn't have timestamps, you should set $timestamps to false in your model to avoid issues with timestamps being set to '0000-00-00 00:00:00'.

$timestamps = false;

Example:

Here's an updated example of a model with a non-auto-incrementing string primary key:

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class UserVerification extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'user_verification';
    protected $fillable = ['email', 'verification_token'];
    //$timestamps = false;  // If your table doesn't have timestamps
    protected $primaryKey = 'verification_token';
    public $incrementing = false;
    protected $keyType = 'string';  // For Laravel 6.0+
}

With these changes, you should now be able to successfully work with a string-based primary key in Laravel 5.2 without the primary key value being reset to 0.

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