Laravel 9 Eloquent model - retained column names in model

Question

I have a postgres database with a table that has a column called "attributes".

The attribute column is of jsonb type, so I use Eloquent conversion:

<code>protected $casts = [
    'attributes' => AsArrayObject::class,
];
</code>

This seems to cause problems because the "property" is already an Eloquent model property, and there doesn't seem to be any provision for aliasing column names.

So this line:

<code>$this->attributes['a_property_of_the_attributes_jsonb_field'] = 'hello word!';
</code>

Appears to be accessing an internal Eloquent model attribute - rather than the 'attributes' field in my database table, resulting in the following error:

SQLSTATE[42703]: Undefined column: 7 ERROR: column "a_property_of_the_attributes_jsonb_field" of relation "mytable" does not exist
LINE 1: update "mytable" set "a_property_of_the_attributes_jsonb_field" = $1 where "mypk" = ...

I cannot rename the column because other non-PHP projects are using the database.

How can I access the Property field in my model as an ArrayObject?

Answer 1

The simple solution is to use the ArrayObject accessor method:

$this['attributes'] = ['x' => 'y'];
$stuff = $this['attributes'];

NOTE: The "attributes" transformation still needs to be defined to access the underlying jsonb field as an array:

protected $casts = [
    'attributes' => AsArrayObject::class
];