Eloquent model timestamp updated without changes

When performing an update, Laravel's Eloquent ORM only touches the timestamp (updated_at) when something was modified. However, depending on your database, the values can be stored with a different value.

Case in Point

MySQL and SQLite store boolean as integer values 1 and 0. As a result, updating a boolean 1 with true will touch the timestamp, which can be confusing.

Solution

To avoid this, you can use attribute casting to cast the column to boolean in the model class.

<?php
 
namespace App\Models;
 
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
 
class ChecklistItem extends Model
{
    /**
     * Get the attributes that should be cast.
     *
     * @return array<string, string>
     */
    protected function casts(): array
    {
        return ['checked' => 'boolean'];
    }
}

This way, Eloquent will check for changes after casting. Here is a simplified version of how Eloquent checks if changes occured (full version here):

    /**
     * Determine if the new and old values for a given key are equivalent.
     *
     * @param  string  $key
     * @return bool
     */
    public function originalIsEquivalent($key)
    {
        if (! array_key_exists($key, $this->original)) {
            return false;
        }

        $attribute = Arr::get($this->attributes, $key);
        $original = Arr::get($this->original, $key);

        if ($attribute === $original) {
            return true;
        }
        
        ...
        
        elseif ($this->hasCast($key, static::$primitiveCastTypes)) {
            return $this->castAttribute($key, $attribute) ===
                $this->castAttribute($key, $original);
        }
        
        ...
    }