In my years of developing systems and API's for various business verticals, one of the most prominent problem I have encountered and still encountering until now are attributes that were not properly cast to their expected data type.

It is always such a headache when you know you should be working with a boolean value but receiving a string instead. Or an integer or float value that is not properly mutated and left as string, especially when working on financial-related stuff. Or worse, an array of objects that is, guess what, left as string.

In Laravel, attribute casting has vastly improved since version 7.x. We only used to have Mutators and Accessors available to us but now, class-based Custom Casts is available. And it is also rich with other sub-features such as Value Object Casting and Serialization.

Just another reason to already bunch of reasons why I love working with Eloquent ORM.

Casting is our first layer of assurance that we are getting correct data types post database query. And these framework-native features give us more than enough reason to always casts our attributes.

So please, don't be lazy and utilize it, for your own sanity.

TIP: If you don't use Eloquent when querying data from your database but still want your attributes to be cast properly? Just manually instantiate your rows instead:

use App\Models\Posts;

$posts = \DB::table('posts')->get();

$posts = $posts->map(fn ($post) => new Post($post));