framework Eloquent dirty check for collections PHP

• Laravel Version: 8.x
• PHP Version: all

Description:

Currently, the eloquent model dirty checks are not working correctly for collection attributes if a value changes between boolean and string.

Steps To Reproduce:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Test extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'collection' => 'collection',
    ];
    protected $fillable = [
        'collection',
    ];
}

$model = new Test(['collection' => ['key' => true]]);
$model->syncOriginal();
$model->fill(['collection' => ['key' => 'value']]);

$model->isDirty(); // false but should be true

Reason for this behaviour:

The attributes are casted within the HasAttributes trait to a collection and checked with php's equality logic: 1. $this->castAttribute($key, $attribute) == $this->castAttribute($key, $original); 2. When using the comparison operator (==), object variables are compared in a simple manner, namely: Two object instances are equal if they have the same attributes and values (values are compared with ==), and are instances of the same class. [PHP: Comparing Objects] 3. $a == $b | Equality | true if $a and $b have the same key/value pairs. [PHP: Array Operators]

So, the values are checked with PHP's simple equality check, which is now showing the typical unsafe type checks with strings. In my opinion, the model should be marked as dirty. Depending on the opinion whether this is a bug or expected behavior, I would propose doing strict dirty checks for next major release.

Asked Oct 08 '21 06:10

tpetry