Cast

[Squad-G]

Hello

I was looking at ways to protect raw data / nicer to read and I found this package on Laravel-News (https://laravel-news.com/query-expressions-for-laravel).

This is a really good package and so far I love it.

There's one problem I ran into... I think it's missing the cast function.

Right Now, I got the following code:
new Expression("sum(cast({$this->balanceWithoutTaxesField} as float)) as balance_without_taxes"),

It would be nice if it could be refactored with something like this:
new Alias(new Sum(new Cast($this->balanceWithoutTaxesField, 'float')), 'balance_without_taxes')

The type could be an Enum but it would lock the package to 8.1

Thanks and keep up the good work

[tpetry]

I'll look at whether casting can be done in a platform-neutral way.

[Squad-G]

Thank you 🙏

[Plytas]

Any news on this?

[tpetry]

I didn't see a way to do this in a way that it works on all systems yet. Their types are all so different, with barely a common thing.

But I could start with a very limited one. To which types do you want to cast currently?

[Plytas]

We're using MySQL and we need to cast to int/float equivalents. We could create custom expressions if you could point us the right way.

[tpetry]

I think casting to numeric values is the most-safe way. You can look at the current implementations of the expressions on how to do it manually. Will play with casting to int/float later the day to see whether the reduced feature-set would work.

[tpetry]

I've implemented a first basic implementation for numeric types. You can now cast to integer (int, bigint) and floating-point (float, double) types with v.1.3.0.

/cc @Squad-G @Plytas