Laravel 9 - Issue with Eager Loading and Custom Attributes in Resource Collections
I'm attempting to set up I'm maintaining legacy code that I keep running into I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock... Can someone help me understand I'm updating my dependencies and I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me... I'm currently working on a Laravel 9 application where I'm experiencing unexpected behavior when trying to use eager loading with custom attributes in my resource collections. I have a `Post` model that has a relationship with a `Comment` model, and I'm trying to include a custom attribute on the `Post` resource that counts the number of comments associated with each post. However, when I eager load the comments, the custom attribute always returns zero, even though I can see the comments in the database. Here’s a simplified version of my `Post` model: ```php class Post extends Model { public function comments() { return $this->hasMany(Comment::class); } public function getCommentsCountAttribute() { return $this->comments()->count(); } } ``` In my controller, I'm trying to return a collection of posts along with their comments: ```php public function index() { $posts = Post::with('comments')->get(); return PostResource::collection($posts); } ``` And in my resource: ```php class PostResource extends JsonResource { public function toArray($request) { return [ 'id' => $this->id, 'title' => $this->title, 'comments_count' => $this->comments_count, 'comments' => CommentResource::collection($this->comments), ]; } } ``` I expected the `comments_count` to reflect the actual number of comments for each post, but it always shows as zero. I've confirmed that comments do exist in the database and that the relationship is set up correctly. To troubleshoot, I tried changing the `getCommentsCountAttribute` method to use `loadCount` in the controller like this: ```php $posts = Post::with('comments')->withCount('comments')->get(); ``` However, this leads to the same issue. The `comments_count` attribute still returns zero in the response. I also checked for any caching issues that might be causing stale data, but clearing the cache didn’t solve it. Any insights on why the custom attribute isn't reflecting the correct count when eager loading the comments? Is there a better approach to achieve this functionality? This is part of a larger web app I'm building. What am I doing wrong? This is part of a larger REST API I'm building. How would you solve this? What's the best practice here? For reference, this is a production service. I'm developing on Ubuntu 22.04 with Php. What am I doing wrong? Any ideas what could be causing this?