Laravel Override Exception on NULL Object Reference - php

Question

For my API we are accepting loads of JSON data. Sometimes there is missing data when we refer to it. So given the following JSON that is posted to the API:
{
"reference_id": "6599",
"balance_0_30": "0",
"balance_31_60": "0",
"balance_over_90": "0",
"account_balance": "0"
}
As I loop over it like this:
foreach ($request->input('data') as $record) {
$record = (object) $record;
$accounting->reference_id = isset($record->reference_id) ? $record->reference_id : NULL;
$accounting->reference_guarantor_id = $record->reference_guarantor_id ?: NULL;
$accounting->balance_0_30 = isset($record->balance_0_30) ? $record->balance_0_30 : NULL;
$accounting->balance_31_60 = isset($record->balance_31_60) ? $record->balance_31_60 : NULL;
$accounting->balance_61_90 = isset($record->balance_61_90 ) ? $record->balance_61_90 : NULL;
$accounting->balance_over_90 = isset($record->balance_over_90) ? $record->balance_over_90 : NULL;
$accounting->account_balance = isset($record->account_balance) ? $record->account_balance : NULL;
This works, but it is rather "messy" to read, and I have about 4000 lines of similar code and growing.
The issue is that if I send up JSON data without the account_balance declared, I get the error:
Undefined property: stdClass
I was thinking I could write a tiny function like this:
function i($value) {
if($value!=null){
if(is_int($value)){
return $value;
}
if(is_float($value)){
return $value;
}
}
return 0;
}
Where if I knew that column would be an integer or float, I could call it like this:
$accounting->account_balance = i($record->account_balance);
Then if the value was null, it would just fill in a 0 and not error out. That would make things much easier to read, troubleshoot and so on. Trouble is that the Exception is thrown before it gets to the i function.
I tried using the set_exception_handler() as described here, including the class example from Glen: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.set-exception-handler.php but it didn't work.
Am I out of luck, or is there a way to do what I want?

Answer 1

You could just do this:
foreach ($request->input('data') as $record) {
Accounting::create($record);
}
Your database columns should be nullable and do not forget to set $fillable attribute in your Accounting model (For this you can set protected $guarded = ['id', 'created_at', 'updated_at']; in your model to consider all other columns as fillable).