Laravel - pluck mutated attribute

Question

I have run into an issue, and it is really only a minor inconvenience, but...

Basically what I need is an associative array for a select box. Normally, this would be achieved using the pluck() function.

The problem is, the attribute that I want to use as the 'text' does not actually exist in the database, it is a mutator that combines two fields into one.

public function getNameAttribute() {
    return $this->first_name . ' ' . $this->last_name;
}

I know that adding the 'name' field to the $appends array on the model will include that field when casting the model to array, however this does not seem to work with pluck()

Is there a simple way to achieve want I want? Function or declaration I'm missing? Anything more eloquent than manually looping over the collection and creating my own associate array?

Update

I'm an idiot. I was passing an array to pluck instead of two parameters. Apparently pluck does utilize the $appends attribute. Note, this only works when working with collections:

$collection->pluck('mutatedValue', 'key');

NOT the query builder

$queryBuilder->pluck('mutatedValue', 'id');

Answer 1

I was looking for an answer to this and ended up with a different result so I thought I'd share.

User::get()->pluck('name');

If you get the object first, your mutated attribute will be accessible.

Answer 2

You can dynamically append the attribute to the objects in your collection:

$users->each(function ($model) { $model->setAppends(['name']); });
$users->pluck('name');

This has the nice advantage of not requiring 'name' always be part of your array data, while allowing your collection to use name just in time.