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Sydney Abuya
Sydney Abuya

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Laravel Attributes

If you want to use the profile_image attribute from an accessor method in your Laravel Eloquent model and have it return /user.png as a fallback when the attribute is empty or false, you can define the accessor within your model. Here's how you can do it:

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    // Other model code...

    public function getProfileImageAttribute($value)
    {
        return $value ? asset('/storage' . $value) : url('/user.png');
    }
}
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With this accessor defined in your User model, whenever you access the profile_image attribute of a User model instance, it will go through this accessor method. If the value is not empty ($value evaluates to true), it will return the asset URL based on the value. Otherwise, it will return the fallback URL /user.png.

In your Blade template, you can then directly use

auth()->user()->profile_image
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without any additional logic:

<img src="{{ auth()->user()->profile_image }}" alt="User Image">
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Why is it named like this getProfileImageAttribute($value)
In Laravel’s Eloquent ORM, attribute accessors are defined using a naming convention that consists of three parts:

  1. get: This indicates that the method is a getter accessor. It's used when you retrieve the value of the attribute.
  2. AttributeName: This part represents the name of the attribute you want to define an accessor for. In your case, it's ProfileImage. The name of the attribute is typically written in "studly case", which means each word in the name starts with an uppercase letter and there are no spaces or underscores between words.
  3. Attribute: This part indicates that the method is an attribute accessor. So, when you put them together, getProfileImageAttribute($value) means:
  • get: It's a getter accessor.
  • ProfileImage: It's for the profile_image attribute.
  • Attribute: It's an attribute accessor.

This naming convention is used to automatically map attribute accessors to the corresponding attributes in the Eloquent model. When you retrieve the value of the profile_image attribute using $model->profile_image, Laravel internally looks for an accessor method named getProfileImageAttribute to provide the value of the attribute. This convention helps Laravel automatically invoke the accessor method when needed without any additional configuration

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