Casting attributes

Casting to DateTime

With Mongolid, you can define attributes to be cast to DateTime or DateTimeImmutable using $casts property in your models.

class Person extends \Mongolid\Model\AbstractModel {
    protected $casts = [
        'expires_at' => 'datetime',
        'birthdate' => 'immutable_datetime',        
    ];
}

When you define an attribute to be cast as DateTime or DateTimeImmutable, Mongolid will load it from database will do its trick to return an DateTime instance(or DateTimeImmutable) anytime you try to access it with property accessor operator (->).

If you need to manipulate its original value on MongoDB, then you can access it through getDocumentAttributes() method

To write a value on an attribute with DateTime cast, you can use both an \MongoDB\BSON\UTCDateTime, \DateTime or \DateTimeImmutable instance. Internally, Mongolid will manage to set the property as an UTCDateTime, because it is the datetime format accepted by MongoDB.

Check out some usages and examples:

$user = Person::first();
$user->birthdate; // Returns birthdate as a DateTimeImmutable instance
$user->expires_at; // Returns expires_at as DateTime instance

$user->getOriginalDocumentAttributes()['birthdate']; // Returns birthdate as an \MongoDB\BSON\UTCDateTime instance

// To set a new birthdate, you can pass both UTCDateTime or native's PHP DateTime
$user->birthdate = new \MongoDB\BSON\UTCDateTime($anyDateTime);
$user->birthdate = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', '01/03/1970');