Laravel's mass asignment in repository - php

Question

I was using the mass assignment feature of the Laravel 4.1 framework, and the problem began to appear when I decided to make my controllers more flexible by adding Repositories. When using this pattern I don't quite understand how to implement standard Eloquent methods as fill() and save()
This is my repository code :
class EloquentUserRepository implements UserRepository
{
public function paginate($perPage = 15, $order = 'ASC', $orderBy = 'id')
{
return User::orderBy($orderBy, $order)->paginate($perPage);
}
public function getInstance()
{
return new User;
}
public function findAll()
{
return User::all();
}
public function find($id)
{
return User::find($id);
}
public function fill(array $data)
{
}
public function update(array $data)
{}
public function save()
{}
public function create(array $data)
{
return User::create($data);
}
public function delete($id)
{
$user = User::find($id);
if ($user)
{
return $user->delete();
}
return false;
}
}
Has anybody made something similar? Thank you.

Answer 1

Maybe this is not the role of a "repository" class. Look at the meaning of repository : "a place where things are stored and can be found". I think you have to find an other pattern.
You can use a kind of procedural methods :
UserSaver::fill($user, $arrayOfAttributes);
UserSaver::save($user);
Or build a class on top of your user class :
$abstractUser = new AbstractUser($user);
$abstractUser->fill($arrayOfAttributes);
$abstractUser->save();
And I'm sure other (maybe better) patterns exist.
I'm not a big fan of all of this patterns because I think that Eloquent is already a good abstraction layer (or maybe because my projects are too small). If I want to change the implementation of all() or save(), I override them in a specific model or in my class BaseModel which inherits all others. I also use events like saving and a lot of query scopes. Then my model and controller layers are very loosely coupled.