Laravel hidden ID

Sometimes it's smart to not expose the ID of a resource. One reason is because the ID can tell how active the site is, we don't always want this.

What I almost always do is to use Hashids. Hashids generates short hashes from numbers. Like this:

Hashids::encrypt(1); //Ri7Bi

Now, to use this automatically it's a good idea to use a Laravel accessor. But we don't want to change the ID itself (that can cause a lot of troubles). So we use a combination of the protected arrays $appends and $hidden.

class Resource extends Eloquent {

    protected $hidden   = array('id');
    protected $appends = array('token');

    public function getTokenAttribute()
    {
        return Hashids::encrypt($this->id);
    }

}

This way we hide the ID and creates a custom attributes that will be returned automatically in the collection.

What do you think?