Eloquent Casting

Bag supports Eloquent casting for both Bag objects and Collections.

Casting Bag Objects

To cast a Bag object, use the Bag class name as the cast type in the $casts property of your Eloquent model:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\Values\MyValue;

class MyModel extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'my_value' => MyValue::class,
    ];
}

This will cast the MyValue object to a JSON string when saving it to the database and will cast it back to a MyValue object when retrieving it from the database.

WARNING

Bag will store all properties, including hidden properties.

Casting Collections

For Laravel 11+, you can cast to a Collection using the casts() method along with the ::castAsCollection() method on your Bag class:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\Values\MyValue;

class MyModel extends Model
{
    public function casts(): array {
        return [
            'my_values' => MyValue::castAsCollection(),
        ];
    }
}

or the AsBagCollection::of() method:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\Values\MyValue;
use Bag\AsBagCollection;

class MyModel extends Model
{
    public function casts(): array {
        return [
            'my_values' => AsBagCollection::of(MyValue::class),
        ];
    }
}

Alternatively, for Laravel 10, you can use the AsBagCollection class as the cast type in the $casts property of your Eloquent model, passing in the Bag class name as the first argument:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\Values\MyValue;
use Bag\AsBagCollection;

class MyModel extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'my_values' => AsBagCollection::class . ':' . MyValue::class,
    ];
}

Bag will cast the Collection to a JSON string when saving to the database and will cast them back to a Collection of MyValue objects when retrieving them from the database.

Bag will automatically use the custom collection class if one is defined on the Bag class when retrieving the value.