laravel problems with mutators - php

Question

My journey into laravel 4 (from laravel 3) continues....
I have an Article model, accessing a table called articles.
I have set up the model with the following mutators:
class Article extends Eloquent {
public function getArticleDateAttribute($value)
{
return date('d/m/Y', strtotime($value));
}
public function getValidUntilAttribute($value)
{
return date('d/m/Y', strtotime($value));
}
}
Now when I query the database with the following AND Delete the mutators everything works as expected and I get the data I expect:
public function getTest() {
$data = Article::select(array(
'articles.id',
'articles.article_date',
'articles.image_link',
'articles.headline',
'articles.category'
)) ->get()
->toArray();
var_dump($data);
//return View::make('_layouts.master');
}
In my test I get the results as expected as this sample:
array (size=5)
'id' => int 3
'article_date' => string '2008-06-03 00:00:00' (length=19)
'image_link' => string '' (length=0)
'headline' => string 'Sussex Amateur Course Closure' (length=29)
'category' => int 6
Now, when I add back the mutators, with the exact query I get the following data:
array (size=6)
'article_date' => string '03/06/2008' (length=10)
'valid_until' => string '01/01/1970' (length=10)
'id' => int 3
'image_link' => string '' (length=0)
'headline' => string 'Sussex Amateur Course Closure' (length=29)
'category' => int 6
the column order is changed and it's included a column I didn't originally request. How should I correctly implement mutators and why do the columns change?
Have I misunderstood this?
Thanks
Ray

Answer 1

The mutators will be called, because the code is built that way. See the implementation of this function in the Eloquent Model class (which is called by toArray()):
/**
* Convert the model's attributes to an array.
*
* #return array
*/
public function attributesToArray()
{
$attributes = $this->getAccessibleAttributes();
// We want to spin through all the mutated attributes for this model and call
// the mutator for the attribute. We cache off every mutated attributes so
// we don't have to constantly check on attributes that actually change.
foreach ($this->getMutatedAttributes() as $key)
{
if ( ! array_key_exists($key, $attributes)) continue;
$attributes[$key] = $this->mutateAttribute($key, $attributes[$key]);
}
return $attributes;
}
https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/master/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php