Why is my Laravel Eloquent accessor not showing up in the response?

Question

I have a Model Review that has a unix timestamp as 1 of it's attributes (table columns).

I use 2 accessors inside this model:

public function getReviewDateAttribute($value)
{
    return strftime('%A %e %B %Y', $value);
}

public function getReviewDateIsoAttribute()
{
    return Carbon::createFromTimestamp($this->review_date)->toDateTimeString();
}

getReviewDateAttribute works as expected and shows up in the collection of models when I write a query.

However getReviewDateIsoAttribute does not. What could be the reason for this?

A subquestion: If I use the same attribute in both functions, how can I use the original format as input value?

Answer 1

You should be adding it to the $appends array. It isn't spinning through all available methods looking for getXXXXXAttribute. The other one is used because it is an accessor for an actual attribute, this one is not an actual attribute.

class YourModel ....
{
     protected $appends = ['review_date_iso'];
     ...
}

Laravel 5.5 Docs - Eloquent - Serialization - Appending Values to JSON

Answer 2

This is probably because ReviewDateIso is not an actual column and therefore will not show up in the model collections...you can access it directly by calling the method directly

$model->getReviewDateIsoAttribute()

According to the docs accessors a ways of changing the value of a column before it is returned to the method that queried it.

If you want it to show up when you call the collection as Json append it to the output with

protected $appends = ['name_of_attribute'];