Php – How to lazy load a custom attribute on a Laravel model

laravellaravel-5PHP

Is there any possible way to lazy load a custom attribute on a Laravel model without loading it every time by using the appends property? I am looking for something akin to way that you can lazy load Eloquent relationships.

For instance, given this accessor method on a model:

public function getFooAttribute(){
    return 'bar';
}

I would love to be able to do something like this:

$model = MyModel::all();
$model->loadAttribute('foo');

This question is not the same thing as Add a custom attribute to a Laravel / Eloquent model on load? because that wants to load a custom attribute on every model load – I am looking to lazy load the attribute only when specified.

I suppose I could assign a property to the model instance with the same name as the custom attribute, but this has the performance downside of calling the accessor method twice, might have unintended side effects if that accessor affects class properties, and just feels dirty.

$model = MyModel::all();
$model->foo = $model->foo;

Does anyone have a better way of handling this?

Best Answer

Is this for serialization? You could use the append() method on the Model instance:

$model = MyModel::all();
$model->append('foo');

The append method can also take an array as a parameter.

Multi-threading is possible in php

Yes you can do multi-threading in PHP with pthreads

From the PHP documentation:

pthreads is an object-orientated API that provides all of the tools needed for multi-threading in PHP. PHP applications can create, read, write, execute and synchronize with Threads, Workers and Threaded objects.

Warning: The pthreads extension cannot be used in a web server environment. Threading in PHP should therefore remain to CLI-based applications only.

Simple Test

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
class AsyncOperation extends Thread {

    public function __construct($arg) {
        $this->arg = $arg;
    }

    public function run() {
        if ($this->arg) {
            $sleep = mt_rand(1, 10);
            printf('%s: %s  -start -sleeps %d' . "\n", date("g:i:sa"), $this->arg, $sleep);
            sleep($sleep);
            printf('%s: %s  -finish' . "\n", date("g:i:sa"), $this->arg);
        }
    }
}

// Create a array
$stack = array();

//Initiate Multiple Thread
foreach ( range("A", "D") as $i ) {
    $stack[] = new AsyncOperation($i);
}

// Start The Threads
foreach ( $stack as $t ) {
    $t->start();
}

?>

First Run

12:00:06pm:     A  -start -sleeps 5
12:00:06pm:     B  -start -sleeps 3
12:00:06pm:     C  -start -sleeps 10
12:00:06pm:     D  -start -sleeps 2
12:00:08pm:     D  -finish
12:00:09pm:     B  -finish
12:00:11pm:     A  -finish
12:00:16pm:     C  -finish

Second Run

12:01:36pm:     A  -start -sleeps 6
12:01:36pm:     B  -start -sleeps 1
12:01:36pm:     C  -start -sleeps 2
12:01:36pm:     D  -start -sleeps 1
12:01:37pm:     B  -finish
12:01:37pm:     D  -finish
12:01:38pm:     C  -finish
12:01:42pm:     A  -finish

Real World Example

error_reporting(E_ALL);
class AsyncWebRequest extends Thread {
    public $url;
    public $data;

    public function __construct($url) {
        $this->url = $url;
    }

    public function run() {
        if (($url = $this->url)) {
            /*
             * If a large amount of data is being requested, you might want to
             * fsockopen and read using usleep in between reads
             */
            $this->data = file_get_contents($url);
        } else
            printf("Thread #%lu was not provided a URL\n", $this->getThreadId());
    }
}

$t = microtime(true);
$g = new AsyncWebRequest(sprintf("http://www.google.com/?q=%s", rand() * 10));
/* starting synchronization */
if ($g->start()) {
    printf("Request took %f seconds to start ", microtime(true) - $t);
    while ( $g->isRunning() ) {
        echo ".";
        usleep(100);
    }
    if ($g->join()) {
        printf(" and %f seconds to finish receiving %d bytes\n", microtime(true) - $t, strlen($g->data));
    } else
        printf(" and %f seconds to finish, request failed\n", microtime(true) - $t);
}

Php – Add a custom attribute to a Laravel / Eloquent model on load

The problem is caused by the fact that the Model's toArray() method ignores any accessors which do not directly relate to a column in the underlying table.

As Taylor Otwell mentioned here, "This is intentional and for performance reasons." However there is an easy way to achieve this:

class EventSession extends Eloquent {

    protected $table = 'sessions';
    protected $appends = array('availability');

    public function getAvailabilityAttribute()
    {
        return $this->calculateAvailability();  
    }
}

Any attributes listed in the $appends property will automatically be included in the array or JSON form of the model, provided that you've added the appropriate accessor.

Old answer (for Laravel versions < 4.08):

The best solution that I've found is to override the toArray() method and either explicity set the attribute:

class Book extends Eloquent {

    protected $table = 'books';

    public function toArray()
    {
        $array = parent::toArray();
        $array['upper'] = $this->upper;
        return $array;
    }

    public function getUpperAttribute()
    {
        return strtoupper($this->title);    
    }

}

or, if you have lots of custom accessors, loop through them all and apply them:

class Book extends Eloquent {

    protected $table = 'books';

    public function toArray()
    {
        $array = parent::toArray();
        foreach ($this->getMutatedAttributes() as $key)
        {
            if ( ! array_key_exists($key, $array)) {
                $array[$key] = $this->{$key};   
            }
        }
        return $array;
    }

    public function getUpperAttribute()
    {
        return strtoupper($this->title);    
    }

}

Best Answer

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