Laravel 10: Appending Values To Model

Set up the relationship

Our Post model has many comments

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany;

class Post extends Model
{
   /**
     *  A Post has many comments
     * @return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany
     */
    public function comments(): HasMany
    {
        return $this->hasMany(Comment::class);
    }
}

Until now there is nothing new, what comes next is what I was talking about. Let’s create an accessor that will return the count of comments related to the current Post.

/**
 * Count comments of posts
*/
protected function countComments(): Attribute
{
   return new Attribute(
       get: fn () => $this->comments()->count()
   );
}

Append the value to the Model

So what we will do now is simple, we want to get the count_comments with the Post object once we grab it. it's as simple as adding the name of the attribute in the appends array.

 /**
   * The accessors to append to the model's array form.
   *
   * @var array
*/

protected $appends = ['count_comments'];

Appending At Run Time

return $post->append('count_comments')->toArray();