Discouraged Laravel Practices and Safer Alternatives

Laravel is an elegant PHP framework that offers many flexible and powerful coding styles, but excessive flexibility can introduce subtle bugs. This article lists several Laravel practices that are generally discouraged and suggests more reliable alternatives.

Request Issues

Accessing request parameters via dynamic properties, e.g., $name = $request->name;, is risky because if the property name matches an existing attribute like query or content, unexpected behavior occurs. The recommended approaches are:

$name = $request->input('name');

$input = $request->all();
$name = $input['name'];

Model $appends

Defining automatic appended attributes in a model, such as:

class User extends Model {
    protected $appends = ['is_adult'];
    public function getIsAdultAttribute() {
        return $this->attribute['age'] > 18;
    }
}

can cause problems when querying without the underlying column (e.g., age) because the appended attribute is still added to the result set. It is better to avoid using the $appends property and instead append attributes explicitly in the controller when needed:

$user = User::first();
$user->append('is_adult');

Model Dynamic Attributes

Accessing model fields directly, like

$user = User::first();
$name = $user->name;

, may conflict with reserved keywords (e.g., exists, incrementing, timestamps, wasRecentlyCreated) defined in the base Eloquent model. A safer method is to convert the model to an array and access fields by key:

$user = User::first()->toArray();
$name = $user['name'];

While many developers prefer the object syntax, avoiding field names that clash with reserved keywords mitigates the risk.

In summary, avoid using request dynamic properties, refrain from defining model $appends, and be cautious with model dynamic attributes to write more maintainable Laravel code.