php - Empty string instead of null values Eloquent

Question

I'm trying to create entities using mass-assignment Eloquent feature...

$new = new Contact(Input::all());
$new->save();

The problem's that this way, every field's filled out with an empty string instead of null values as I expected.

I'm currently developing the system and still some table columns're not defined, that's why using this method, to avoid adding every new field to $fillable array and to a new Contact(array(...));...

Also I've around 20 fields in this table, so It'd be a bit ugly to have an array such as

$new = new Contact(array(
    'salutation' => Input::get('salutation'),
    'first_name' => Input::get('first_name'),
    'last_name'  => Input::get('last_name'),
    'company_id' => Input::get('company_id'),
    'city' => ...
    ...
));

Any tips of how to do this or fix?

Update By now I've sorted out this doing the array_filter in the App::before() filter.

Update In filter was a bit mess. I end up doing:

public static function allEmptyIdsToNull()
{
    $input = Input::all();

    $result = preg_grep_keys ( '/_id$/' , $input );

    $nulledResults = array_map(function($item) {
        if (empty($item))
            return null;

        return $item;
    }, $result);

    return array_merge($input, $nulledResults);
}

And in my functions.php.

if ( ! function_exists('preg_grep_keys'))
{
    /**
    * This function gets does the same as preg_grep but applies the regex
    * to the array keys instead to the array values as this last does.
    * Returns an array containing only the keys that match the exp.
    * 
    * @author Daniel Klein
    * 
    * @param  string  $pattern
    * @param  array  $input
    * @param  integer $flags
    * @return array
    */
    function preg_grep_keys($pattern, array $input, $flags = 0) {
        return array_intersect_key($input, array_flip(preg_grep($pattern, array_keys($input), $flags)));
    }
}

By now only working with fields that ends with "_id". This is my biggest problem as if a relationship is not NULL, the database will throw an error as the foreign key "" cannot be found.

Works perfect. Any comment?

Answer 1

I've looked for the answer to this myself, and the closest I can come up with is using Mutators (http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#accessors-and-mutators).

The same problem was solved by adding a (magic!) Mutator method for the foreign key field in the model:

public function setHeaderImageIdAttribute($value)
{
    $this->attributes['header_image_id'] = $value ?: null;
}

For a table with a lot of foreign keys, this can get kind of bulky, but it's the most "built-in" method I've found for handling this. The upside is that it's magic, so all you have to do is create the method and you're good to go.

UPDATE -- Laravel 5.4 and above

As of Laravel 5.4, the IlluminateFoundationHttpMiddlewareConvertEmptyStringsToNull::class middleware handles this when the request is received. In my example above, if the request contains an empty string value for 'header_image_id', this middleware automatically converts it to null before I can assign it to my model.