What are the implications of overriding the toArray() method on an Eloquent model?

[willsmanley]

I have a design construct wherein a model will have a media object associated with it (like a profile picture) which is stored under a certain pathname in an S3 bucket.

In MySQL, I simply store the pathname. So in a column called profile_pic a value might be profile-pics/12345.png.

Then, when I need to request that model from the front-end app, I need to attach the appropriate CDN prefix, as well as query parameters to make it a full URL. So I have a method shared by many models called sign() which basically converts the pathname into this:

https://cdn.mywebsite.com/profile-pics/12345.png?cloudfront-signature=12345

I really liked this structure a lot, because I can change the CDN whenever I want without having to update MySQL data. And besides, the query parameter changes on every request and necessarily cannot be stored in advance. It is partially based on the user's IP address.

The problem is that I ended up calling this sign() method just about everywhere. Nearly every time I have an API request with a JSON response, at least 1 model is getting "signed" by this method before it is converted into JSON.

Then I had some issues where the sign() method was mistakenly not called because I forgot to add it in certain places.

I realized it would be much cleaner to override the toArray() method to always "sign" the pathnames using the sign() method.

I tried it out, and it works really well. I basically just request a User and then it signs the image right before converting it to JSON. And I don't have to actually call sign() directly because it is called for me. Additionally, it seems to not impact any DB queries, so I am assuming that Eloquent DB queries don't use toArray().

So my question is this: are there any other times where the Laravel framework uses toArray() besides when converting an Eloquent model to JSON for a response? I don't want to accidentally sign the values and then persist that to MySQL, since it is supposed to be pathname only in the DB.

I used PhpStorm to search for usages, and it turns out there are hundreds. I can't necessarily go through each one to see how it would affect me.

OR... would it be better to override a different method such as jsonSerialize() which might be more specifically applicable to converting Eloquent models for JSON HTTP responses...?

OR, OR... would it be better to make a macro or otherwise override JsonResponse to have it handle extra jobs like signing media pathnames? So far I have found that most of the usages of jsonSerialize() and toJson() relate to logging.

[willsmanley]

This has been a monologue but for others stumbling upon my discussion, it seems that there are no adverse implications of toArray(). Basically the only times it seems to be called are when creating a JSON response or when explicitly calling it within your own project code. So I overrode toArray() (instead of my alternative choices like jsonSerialize()) and added image signing, ensuring UTF-8 encoding, and some other things.