Api: Model attributes as camel case when sending JSON response

[andrewmclagan]

Our Eloquent models have attributes following the Laravel snake case convention.

e.g. first_name, last_name and created_at

Although my frontend (react) follows the javascript camel case standard.

e.g. firstName, lastName and createdAt

Is there a simple way to convert ALL attributes to camel case when sending an API response?

We are using Larave 5.2 (and the Dingo API package of course)

[catalinux]

In your transformer, in method transform there will be a toArray call on your model. You could change those keys in transform method, or you could add on your BaseModel a

 public function toArrayCamel()
    {
        $array = $this->toArray();

        foreach($array as $key => $value)
        {
            $return[camel_case($key)] = $value;
        }

        return $return;
    }

and use it in your transformer

[jasonlewis]

Aye, use a transformer,

[andrewmclagan]

yeah, we are using a customer transformer. Although now we face the problem of transforming all incoming requests back to snake_case... face slap

Why is it such a struggle to get laravel to use a different case standard?

We implemented a middleware the transforms everything fine, although the problem is for some strange reason FormRequests do not have HTTP middleware stack applied to them...

[jasonlewis]

Why do you need to send incoming keys as camel case?

[andrewmclagan]

Dealing with camelCase everywhere e.g. JavaScript, backend etc... And having snake_case database tables is really frustrating

[catalinux]

fields should be snake_case in your database and php. In you JS you could have transformers on your xhr request that transform from camelCase to snake_case on reading and writing over http so you could use in your js code withought having lint screaming about your keys

[geocine]

Almost any other api framework is able to accept input as the standard json camelCase . I strongly agree that this should be added here

[hskrasek]

@geocine the package doesnt care what the keys come in as, and Laravel supports any input key as well (maybe not any, I haven't tried using an emoji as an input key yet). So getting the input as myField and mapping it to my_field into the database shouldn't be difficult.

Only time that'll give you a headache is if you're just dumping $request->input() into the database insert directly, but you can just use a variety of array functions or a collection pipeline to transform the input keys from camelCase to snake_case

[geocine]

@hskrasek That is exactly what I did, I created my own Request implementation

[kagan94]

I expected to find a tunning built-in feature, but I couldn't find it.

One of the solutions:
https://github.com/grohiro/laravel-camelcase-json

[specialtactics]

If anyone is still wondering how to best approach, I have an API boilerplate (for which this package is a basis for) - https://github.com/specialtactics/l5-api-boilerplate

You can have a look at the transformer, it does quite a lot of interesting things, including solving this problem -

https://github.com/specialtactics/l5-api/blob/master/src/Transformers/RestfulTransformer.php

[StefanPrintezis]

If anyone is still wondering how to best approach, I have an API boilerplate (for which this package is a basis for) - https://github.com/specialtactics/l5-api-boilerplate

You can have a look at the transformer, it does quite a lot of interesting things, including solving this problem -

https://github.com/specialtactics/l5-api/blob/master/src/Transformers/RestfulTransformer.php

Since it's about 2 years since the last reply I'd like to add the best approach for now would be to use ApiResources
https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/eloquent-resources#writing-resources

/**
 * Transform the resource into an array.
 *
 * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
 * @return array
 */
public function toArray($request)
{
    return [
        'id' => $this->id,
        'name' => $this->name,
        'teaserImageUrl' => $this->teaser_image_url,
    ];
}