private $email in User model => no mails sent

[sscharfenberg]

Hi everyone,

I was playing around with Laravel and IntelliJ complained when accessing Model properties via "magic method", like $user->email. So I had the brilliant idea to declare $email as a private property in the User model. A week later I noticed that Laravel doesn't send emails anymore. After lots of diffs and several "composer create-project" I removed the private property in the model, and emails are sent out again.

Please note that I am frontend focussed and not very proficient in either Laravel or php. So, am I an idiot for declaring $email as a private property - and if so, why? :) Should I only declare properties that I add to the user model?

[NiclasvanEyk]

The attributes of your eloquent models that are saved to the database work a bit differently than the normal class properties.
The "database" attributes like User::email are actually stored in the $attributes property (see HasAttributes-trait, which the eloquent Model class uses). Under the hood you can access $user->email, even though you did not explicitly declare it through PHPs magic-methods __get and __set. These basically delegate the calls from $user->email to actually return $user->attributes['email'] (simplified).

If you just want IntelliJ to stop complain and want a better experience with IntelliJ and Laravel in general, you can install barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper, which scans your models/database and auto-generates files for your IDE to know, which attributes your models have.

[sscharfenberg]

Thank you, great explanation :) I'll make sure to check the laravel-ide-helper.