Create Your Own Custom Casts in Laravel

• Create Custom Casts in Laravel
• Step 1: Create a Custom Cast Class
• Step 2: Use the Custom Cast in a Model
• Additional Notes

Create Custom Casts in Laravel

In Laravel, Eloquent provides a simple way to cast attributes to common data types like integers, booleans, arrays, and even objects. But sometimes, the built-in casts aren’t enough. That’s where custom casts come in. They allow you to define your own logic for how a model attribute should be stored and retrieved.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to create and use a custom cast in Laravel.

Step 1: Create a Custom Cast Class

To create a custom cast, you need to implement the CastsAttributes interface. This interface requires two methods:

• get($model, $key, $value, $attributes) – used when retrieving the value from the database
• set($model, $key, $value, $attributes) – used when storing the value into the database

Here’s an example of a custom cast that encrypts and decrypts a value:

namespace App\Casts;
 
use Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Eloquent\CastsAttributes;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Crypt;
 
class Encrypted implements CastsAttributes
{
    public function get($model, $key, $value, $attributes): string
    {
        return Crypt::decryptString($value);
    }
 
    public function set($model, $key, $value, $attributes): string
    {
        return Crypt::encryptString($value);
    }
}

This cast will automatically encrypt a value before saving it to the database and decrypt it when retrieving it.

Step 2: Use the Custom Cast in a Model

Once your custom cast is ready, you can assign it to a model attribute using the $casts property:

use App\Casts\Encrypted;
 
class User extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'secret' => Encrypted::class,
    ];
}

Now, whenever you access $user->secret, the value will be decrypted, and when you set $user->secret = 'value', it will be encrypted before saving.

Additional Notes

• The custom cast must be a class that implements CastsAttributes.
• Custom casts give you full control over how attributes behave.