Query  Casting in Laravel

Query Casting in Laravel

Sometimes you may need to apply casts while executing a query, such as when selecting a raw value from a table. For example, consider the following query:

use App\Models\Post;
use App\Models\User;

$users = User::select([
    'users.*',
    'last_posted_at' => Post::selectRaw('MAX(created_at)')->whereColumn('user_id', 'users.id')
])->get();

The last_posted_at attribute on the results of this query will be a raw string. It would be convenient if we could apply a date cast to this attribute when executing the query. To accomplish this, we may use the withCasts method:

$users = User::select([
    'users.*',
    'last_posted_at' => Post::selectRaw('MAX(created_at)')->whereColumn('user_id', 'users.id')])->withCasts([
    'last_posted_at' => 'datetime'])
->get();