Hussain Afeef

Let's discuss Enums in Laravel. Although there are numerous tutorials on how to use enums in Laravel and how to validate them, today I'd like to talk about something I discovered while using enums.

As a Maldivian, I frequently need to display enum values in my locale language, and enums do not support this out of the box. Allow me to demonstrate how I resolved this problem.

For the context of this article, we'll be using a Post model. Let's create a post migration with the following code (most of the fields have been removed for clarity).

Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->string('title');
    $table->text('content')->nullable();
    $table->string('status');
    $table->timestamps();
});

Now let's create an enum for the status. You can place them wherever you like, but I usually put them in the app/Support/Enums directory.

enum PostStatuses: string
{
    case DRAFT = 'draft';
    case PUBLISHED = 'published';
}

Now let's update the post model to use the enum.

class Post extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'status' => PostStatuses::class
    ];
}

If I create a post and call $post->status, it will now return a PostStatuses instance. However, even if I add the translation for draft and published to the lang file and change the app locale, it will not display the translation. Therefore, I started adding an options method for every enum with translatable strings.

enum PostStatuses: string
{
    case DRAFT = 'draft';
    case PUBLISHED = 'published';

    public static function options(): array
    {
        return [
            self::DRAFT->value => __('Draft'), 
            self::PUBLISHED->value => __('Published'), 
        ];
    }
}

This allows me to easily fetch the translatable string as shown below.

\App\Support\Enums\PostStatuses::options()[$post->status->value];

I can further simplify this and add it as a method to the enum class.

public function getLabel(): string
{
    return self::options()[$this->value];
}

As a result, I can now get the translatable string value by simply calling getLabel() on the status as shown below.

$post->status->getLabel();

This will work, but let me show you what my final implementation looks like.

// Enum
enum PostStatuses: string implements Translatable
{

    use HasTranslatableLabels;
    
    case DRAFT = 'draft';
    case PUBLISHED = 'published';

    public static function options(): array
    {
        return [
            self::DRAFT->value => __('Draft'),
            self::PUBLISHED->value => __('Published'),
        ];
    }

}

// Enum Interface
interface Translatable
{

    public static function options(): array;

    public function getLabel(): string;

}

// Enum Trait
trait HasTranslatableLabels
{

    public function getLabel(): string
    {
        return self::options()[$this->value];
    }

}

If you have any ideas or thoughts about this article, feel free to leave a comment on my Twitter post. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

How to Add Translatable Enum Options in Laravel