Cast on Updated At column not applied for rapid saves (i.e. unit tests)

[willpower232]

We are making use of a legacy database written for an ancient framework in Laravel. One "feature" of this framework is that integer unix timestamps are used for the updated_at column instead of datetime strings.

We can deal with this by setting protected $dateFormat = 'U'; on the model classes however ideally we would like to use datetimes for application-specific time-related columns going forward so don't want to force the format on all new columns.

We wrote a cast to juggle the value from an instance of Carbon to $carbon->timestamp and all seemed well until we went to write unit tests for the functionality.

The tests failed because data was being truncated for the updated_at column as it was receiving a datetime string instead of the timestamp from the cast.

I believe this is occurring here as it does not seem to check for casts before appending an updated_at value

framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Builder.php

Line 1140 in 31b3d29

[$column => $this->model->freshTimestampString()],

I think that updated_at is not marked as dirty because the value has not changed because the change has been within the same second as the creation or another update.

A quick resolution to this problem within tests is to include $this->travelTo(now()->addMinute()); before every change made to a particular model so that the casted value is picked up with the dirty attributes

framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php

Line 1212 in 31b3d29

$dirty = $this->getDirty();

Obviously this is not possible within the main application so this problem may occur there if there are saves within the same second from different parts of the code.

I am unsure as to whether the resolution is for the builder to cast the value before appending it or for any dirty attributes check to always include the updated_at value if any other changed values are present.

Should I make a bug issue for this?

[willpower232]

#47769