Release 4.14 contains a breaking change for casts that accessed DataProperty->attributes

[LauJosefsen]

Hi.

Release 4.14 changed the type of DataProperty::attributes from \Illuminate\Support\Collection to \Spatie\LaravelData\Support\DataAttributesCollection. The API of these two classes are not compatible.

Since the attributes property is public, I would expect no such breaking changes in a minor release. We used this property to implement certain casts, and this implementation broke from this minor bump.

I assume it was either unclear this was a breaking change, or the attributes property was not supposed to be part of the public api. If it is not part of the public API, it would be nice it was not public or otherwise documented as non public.

Laravel Data: ^4.14

[bastianschwarz]

We use this in a RuleInferrer to remove some defaults based on the validation attributes present and our pipeline just turned into a christmas tree.

Easy enough fix as the collection has an has() method but good luck to anyone without a CI 😅
And I also hope the attributes will remain accessible in the future.

[rubenvanassche]

As mentioned in another issue, we ware unaware people were actually using these attributes collections, since except from a mention in the docs they aren't documented and almost everything in these attributes has been mapped to the DataProperty or DataClass structures.

We're going to keep them public since these attributes are used throughout the whole package for various purposes, making them protected or private isn't really an option since PHP doesn't have a concept of friends. Another option would be tagging them with @internal but that makes the code quite unreadable in my opinion and that's something to avoid.

We could revert this change, but since the small amount of people who do use these classes already made changes, reverting things would also break things. So we'll continue with the current approach and in the future try to be a bit more careful changing these internal classes.

Gonna leave this issue open for other people having the same problem.

[dmekhov]

Previously, I used the $attributes collection to gather Attributes from parent classes, allowing me to override their values easily.

Example:

class A extends Data
{
    #[Label('New Only')]
    public bool $skipExisted = true;
}

class B extends A
{
    public bool $skipExisted = false;
}

In the new implementation, I have to copy all attributes from the parent to the child even when I just want to override a single value.

Before, I was able to iterate over all parent classes and collect attributes for the same property from the parent.
This is no longer possible in the current implementation.

Simplified example:

$class = $class->getParentClass();
$property = $class->getProperty($property->getName());
foreach ($property->getAttributes() as $attribute) {
  $attributes->push($attribute->newInstance());
}

Any way I can solve this? (Except for the case of searching for parent attributes in each call?)