How to get Laravel Query Builder result as integer

Question

I'm using Laravel Query Builder to query MySQL database but it returns integer values as string values.

I have the following query.

$query = DB::table('store_products')->select('products.id', 'products.name', 'products.unit_type', 'products.price', 'products.image_path', 'products.is_popular', 'store_products.price AS store_price')
           ->join('products', 'products.id', '=', 'store_products.product_id')
           ->join('product_categories', 'product_categories.product_id', '=', 'store_products.product_id')
           ->where('store_products.store_id', $store_id)
           ->where('store_products.product_id', $product_id);

Here the query gets Product which is existing in Store_Products for given store_id.

The problem is, it returns id (which is the Primary Key for Product) as string when I use Query Builder. Looks like there is something wrong with casts.

How can I solve this problem?

Thank you very much in advance.

Answer 1

Casting is not a solution but a workaround to the problem. Your actual problem is missing mysqlnd plugin.

Check whether mysqlnd is installed like so

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep 'mysqlnd'

If it's not installed, you need to install it like so (assuming you have php5)

$ sudo apt-get install php5-mysqlnd

These commands are for ubuntu. If you have something else, just convert them to your appropriate OS.

Answer 2

When fetching by select it populates the $attribute internal property with raw data returned by the underlying driver, so generally the MySQL driver is configured to return all columns as strings. Here it does not casts the id attribute to integer.

You have to manually cast it to integer. you can either use (int) $variable syntax to cast it to integer on the fly where you are accessing the attribute of the model or you can make a mutator for that reason.

public function getIdAttribute($value)
{
    return (int) $value;
}

Or you can cast your attribute

protected $casts = [
    'id' => 'integer',
];