Laravel Fluent Plus

This package extends Laravel's Fluent class to provide a supercharged experience like type casting and recursive Fluent access to sub-assocs.

Basic usage

Instead of extending Illuminate\Support\Fluent you extend JanPantel\LaravelFluentPlus\FluentPlus instead. As this class is a superset of Fluent it can be treated as a drop in replacement.

FluentPlus implements a $casts property that defines how the attributes of your assoc should be cast.

For the following example assume NamesContainer, Price and StockLevel to be classes extending Fluent or FluentPlus as well.

class MyContainer extends FluentPlus
{
    protected $casts = [
        // Use the contents of the `names` attribute
        // to initialize a new `NamesContainer` instance.
        'names' => NamesContainer::class,

        // Assumes that the `price` attribute contains
        // an array and initializes a new `Price` instance
        // for every item. 
        'prices' => [Price::class],

        // The same as the array syntax but using
        // Laravel's `Collection` class instead.
        'stock' => [
            \Illuminate\Support\Collection::class,
            StockLevel::class
        ],
    ];
}

The resulting object now offers convenient property access:

$container = new MyContainer($sourceAssoc);

var_dump($container->names->english);
var_dump($container->prices[0]->amount);
var_dump($container->stock->get('store_1')->quantity);

The problem this package solves

If you work with assocs a lot and like using property access over assoc access Laravel's Fluent class is a convenient way to do so.

The use case that made me write this package is working with responses fetched from 3rd party APIs. Since I want to use @property PHP docs to have "type safety" while not manually assigning properties.

Advanced usage

Recursive array casts

FluentPlus casts sub-assocs that do not have a cast defined into other FluentPlus for infinite dimension property access.

$instance = new Fluent(['foo' => ['bar' => 'baz']]);
$instancePlus = new FluentPlus(['foo' => ['bar' => 'baz']]);

// breaks :(
var_dump($instance->foo->bar);
// works :)
var_dump($instancePlus->foo->bar);

You can turn this feature off by setting the $recursive property in your derived FluentPlus to false or using the NonRecursiveFluentPlus utility class if you want to inline it instead.