Database Notifications stored with Unix Timestamp

[rileysiemens]

Hey everyone!

The project I'm working on stores all timestamps as Unix timestamps. We also us a custom wrapper around Carbon (that we call "Nitrogen") that does some date & translation specific things for our project. All of our timestamps are stored as Unix timestamps and are cast using our custom class.

Our app\Models\Model.php looks like this:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use App\Casts\NitrogenCast;
use \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model as EloquentModel;

class Model extends EloquentModel {
    protected $dateFormat = 'U';
    protected $casts = [
        'created_at' => NitrogenCast::class,
        'updated_at' => NitrogenCast::class,
    ];
}

I'm implementing notifications in my project, and I'd like to do similar things with DatabaseNotifications stored in the "notifications" table. Any ideas how I could do that?

[iazaran]

I think making a model that extends DatabaseNotification src/Illuminate/Notifications/DatabaseNotification.php like class NitrogenDatabaseNotification extends DatabaseNotification can help us to add $dateFormat and override $casts.

[rileysiemens]

Thanks for the idea.

I made a custom class and named it "Database Notification" thinking that maybe the framework would pick up on a user-defined model with the same name and use it instead of the default.

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use App\Casts\NitrogenCast;
use \Illuminate\Notifications\DatabaseNotification as LaravelDatabaseNotification;

class DatabaseNotification extends LaravelDatabaseNotification {
    protected $dateFormat = 'U';
    protected $casts = [
        'created_at' => NitrogenCast::class,
        'updated_at' => NitrogenCast::class,
    ];
}

But this didn't work. It's still trying to store the timestamps as strings (which doesn't work because in the migration I created the columns as integers).

Is there anyway to "publish" the file so that you can force Laravel to use my custom class instead?

[iazaran]

Because of using Notifiable trait in models like User model, I think that trait needs to be extended or overriding to consider your DatabaseNotification model. And then we can use that trait instead of default one.
I didn't test this scenario, but it is good idea if you check the src/Illuminate/Notifications/HasDatabaseNotifications.php you can see the trait is using default DatabaseNotification and so it can be overridden.

[rileysiemens]

Ah yes, good idea. Thank you! I'll try that and see how it goes.

[rileysiemens]

Update: This worked like a charm! Thanks!