How to get back lower case column names in Eloquent? - php

Question

I am working with a database which has all uppercase snakecase column names and when I fetch them with eloquent I do something like:
foreach($data as $key => $item){
$data[$key] = array_change_key_case($item);
}
This makes the keys ie the column names to lower case, but it soon becomes inefficient since I need to nested arrays too like so:
foreach($tasks as $key => $task){
foreach($task['users'] as $innerKey => $user){
$task['users'][$innerKey] = array_change_key_case($user);
}
$tasks[$key] = array_change_key_case($task);
}
And I can't change the database. Is there a way I can make eloquent give me back the column names in lower case?

Answer 1

You can transform column names at the driver level using PDO attributes. To do so, set your Laravel connection options (in app/config/database.php) like so:
return array(
'connections' => array(
'mysql' => array(
'options' => array(
PDO::ATTR_CASE => PDO::CASE_LOWER,
),
),
)
)
The default is PDO::CASE_NATURAL, which is why your code sees them as the database has them stored.
Update: If you are using MySQL, you might consider setting lower_case_table_names = 2, which tells the server:
If set to 2, table names are stored as given but compared in lowercase. This option also applies to database names and table aliases.

Answer 2

If override the getAttribute() method on your model you can transform the key before the call:
public function getAttribute($key)
{
$databaseColumn = implode('_', array_map('ucfirst', explode('_', $key)));
return parent::getAttribute($databaseColumn);
}
This will allow you to do $model->get_model_param and it will access $model->Get_Model_Param on the model.