webpatser/laravel-uuid

[Question] To String Magic Method

DanVeira opened this issue · 2 comments

DanVeira commented

Why do these two work the same way?

$someModel = new SomeModel();
$someModel->uuid = Uuid::generate(4);
$someModel->save();

$someModel = new SomeModel();
$someModel->uuid = Uuid::generate(4)->string;
$someModel->save();

In the first one I'm not specifically getting the string but yet it works exactly the same.
If I do dd(Uuid::generate(4)) and dd(Uuid::generate(4)->string) it prints different things:

Uuid {#327 ▼
  #bytes: b"Å\x17ãÆˤAËùTÜ┴\x17┌¨¢"
  #hex: null
  #string: "8f17c692-d3cf-41d3-9754-9ac117daf9bd"
  #urn: null
  #version: null
  #variant: null
  #node: null
  #time: null
}

"f48abcbb-fbf7-417e-9493-d67ce86055d0"

So clearly they're different, but when I'm inserting into the database it will automatically get the string key.

Why? Please help me understand this.

webpatser commented

See this function in the UUID class

    /**
     * Return the UUID
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function __toString()
    {
        return $this->string;
    }

When you cast a UUID instance to string:

$uuid = (string) UUID::generate();

this would return the text variant and not instance itself.

When you do

$someModel->uuid = Uuid::generate(4);

eloquent does the string cast for you, so the _toString() method is fired and the Uuid::generate(4)->string is supplied.

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