Laravel: Unexpected Behavior of Date in JSON Response

Question

I am making a web service in Laravel which is returning JSON.

I have created an Account model like so:

class Account extends Eloquent {

    // The database table used by the model.
    // (If not defined then lowercase and plural of class name is consider as a table name)
    protected $table = "account";

     // define which column can be mass assign
    protected $fillable = array("user_id", "account_group_id", "generated_by", "image", "name", 
                                "address", "zip", "area_id", "mobile", "email", "phone", "fax",
                                "website", "pan", "cst", "tin", "ecc", "iesc", "transport", 
                                "other", "outstanding", "cform", "status", "mitp");

    // To prevent column from mass assignment.
    protected $guarded = array('id');

    // Change Variable for CREATED_AT and UPDATED_AT
    const CREATED_AT = 'itp';
    const UPDATED_AT = 'utp';
}

I am fetching fields from Account using user_id and returning JSON via Response::json() in my controller

$accountData = Account::select('name', 'status', 'id', 'user_id', 'utp')->where('user_id', Auth::id())->first();
$return = array(
                'result' => 'success',
                'msg' => 'Login Successfully.',
                'data' => $accountData
               );
return Response::json($return);

In this, utp behaves as expected and returns a date as a string:

{
  "result": "success",
  "msg": "Login Successfully.",
  "data": {
    "name": "Demo",
    "status": 0,
    "id": 143,
    "user_id": 207,
    "utp": "2015-07-01 18:38:01"
  }
}

However if I take each value separately from the account model like so:

$return = array(
    'result' => 'success',
    'msg' => 'Login Successfully.',
    'data' => $accountData['user_id'],
    'account_id' => $accountData['id'],
    'utp' => $accountData['utp'],
    'usertype' => 'account',
    'status' => $accountData['status']
);

Then this gives some unexpected behavior from utp

{
  "result": "success",
  "msg": "Login Successfully.",
  "data": 207,
  "account_id": 143,
  "utp": {
    "date": "2015-07-01 18:38:01",
    "timezone_type": 3,
    "timezone": "Asia\\/Kolkata"
  },
  "usertype": "account",
  "status": 0
}

Why does this happen with my timestamp field?

Answer 1

Because utp is a Carbon\Carbon instance. Model::toJson (actually Model::toArray, but both are used) handles that usually, and serializes a date to it's usual ISO3601-ish format

For expected behavior, you need to format the Carbon instance.

"utp" => $accountData['utp']->format("Y-m-d H:i:s"),

Alternatively, cast it to a string

"utp" => (string) $accountData['utp'],