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Laravel’s routing and binding is nice

But when I got it wrong I didn’t get the kind of error I expected

Laravel automatically resolves Eloquent models defined in routes or controller actions whose type-hinted variable names match a route segment name.

use App\Models\User;
 
Route::get('/users/{user}', function (User $user) {
    return $user->email;
});

Laravel Routing : Binding

This works for controller methods too.

Couple of things to note here

First - the type hinted model is matched by name - and it’s case sensitve

So this

use App\Models\User;
 
Route::get('/users/{User}', function (User $user) {
    return $user->email;
});

Won’t work because $User and $user are not the same thing in PHP.

Secondly the way it doesn’t work surprised me.

There were no warnings about a type mismatch, and not 404 returned as you’d expect for an invalid ID.

Instead what I got passed to my method was a null object of the right type but with no properties.

So my code failed when I looked for expected properties.

When I ran dd() I saw the right type of object - bit without the data I expected.