Adding new property to Eloquent Collection

Question

Trying to add new property to existing collection and access that.

What I need is something like:

$text = Text::find(1);  //Text model has properties- id,title,body,timestamps
$text->user = $user;

And access the user via, $text->user.

Exploring on documentation and SO, I found put, prepend, setAttribute methods to do that.

$collection = collect();
$collection->put('a',1);
$collection->put('c',2);
echo $collection->c; //Error: Undefined property: Illuminate\Support\Collection::$c

Again,

$collection = collect();
$collection->prepend(1,'t');
echo $collection->t = 5; //Error: Undefined property: Illuminate\Support\Collection::$t

And

$collection = collect();
$collection->setAttribute('c',99); // Error: undefined method setAttribute
echo $collection->c;

Any help?

Solution

I think you mix here Eloquent collection with Support collection. Also notice when you are using:

$text = Text::find(1);  //Text model has properties- id,title,body,timestamps
$text->user = $user;

you don't have here any collection but only single object.

But let's look at:

$collection = collect();
$collection->put('a',1);
echo $collection->c; //Error: Undefined property: Illuminate\Support\Collection::$c

You are taking c and you don't have such element. What you should do is taking element that is at a key like this:

echo $collection->get('a');

or alternatively using array access like this:

echo $collection['a'];

Also notice there is no setAttribute method on Collection. There is setAttribute method on Eloquent model.

Comments

[Shafi]

Thanks for your answer. Ok, laravel documentation tells, query like 'all' or 'get' returns instance of Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection. So shouldn't be setAttribute method available? And I updated the example of "using put method".

[Marcin Nabiałek]

No, setAttribute is available for single model, and you don't use here anywhere get or all to get models. If you want to have collection of models you could use: $text = Text::where('id', 1)->get(); and now you have first model in $text[0] but obviously when you are looking by id it does not make any sense to have collection of results because you have only single element with this id.

[Shafi]

Got the point I was missing. Accepting your answer. Thanks for your effort.