Dev Kandil👨‍💻

Hey Laravel Developers 👩‍💻 Eloquent allows us to perform array casting which converts an attribute which is a JSON string to an array. But many beginners are confused about what it exactly does and what benefits it provides! So here is a bit detailed explanation of what it does during array casting. Whenever we perform a query whose results include a JSON column, as PHP does not directly have a JSON data type it internally stores the JSON as a string. Now it's obvious that you might want to fetch some data from the JSON, so for this operation. PHP provides us with the json_decode() function which converts a JSON string to an array that PHP can understand and work with. Also after making certain manipulations to the PHP array you might want to again save this JSON string to the database. PHP has the json_encode function which does the same i.e. converts a PHP array to a JSON string. So this conversion is likely to happen at multiple places in the entire code base. This is what casting does, it automates this conversion under the hood for you. Here is how casting helps in reducing the total number of lines we write... #laravel #php

Hey Laravel Developers 👩‍💻 Laravel provides us with amazing utilities to handle and work with files. But if your application is dealing with a lot of files and images, I would highly recommend checking out Spatie's media library package out Here are some amazing features that come with this package Fluent API to attach and fetch media files for a model So the media-library package contains a trait that includes methods for interacting with media files. By adding this trait to our models and making minor configurations we have the following APIs to attach and fetch media files with ease #laravel #php

Hey Laravel Developers 👩‍💻 Laravel's Eloquent ORM comes with the belongsToMany relationship method which allows us to connect two tables using a pivot/intermediate table. This is useful for use cases like many users subscribing to many podcasts, many users enrolling in many courses, and many users taking memberships in multiple groups etc. If you want to access any column from the pivot table we have to use the pivot attribute. For example, to fetch the enrolment time of a user for a course we can use `$course->pivot->created_at`, But I like to rename the pivot word with something meaningful for my application. For example in this case I want to name it as enrolment so I can access it as `$course->enrolment->created_at`. Here is an example code showing how we can rename the pivot attribute to enrolment. #laravel #php