New in Laravel 12: Eager Loading, Attribute Scopes, and fromJson

⚡Eager Loading Improvements

When working with nested relationships like users -> posts -> comments, you can now eager load deeply related data in just one query set:

$users = User::with('posts.commments')->get();
foreach ($users as $user) {
		foreach ($user->posts as $post) {
        echo $post->commets;
     }
		echo $user->name;
}

Laravel 12 also supports automatic eager loading, removing the need to manually call with() each time:

        $users = User::all();

        $users->withRelationshipAutoLoading();

        foreach ($users as $user) {
            foreach ($user->posts as $post) {
               echo $post->commets;
            }
            echo $user->name;
        }

Global Auto Eager Loading

To enable eager loading for all models globally, set it in your AppServiceProvider:

public function boot()
{
    Model::automaticallyEagerLoadRelationships();
}

Attribute Scopes

In Laravel, query scopes let you extract common query logic into reusable methods on your Eloquent models. Laravel 12 introduced a cleaner and more modern way to define these scopes using attributes.

Previously, you had to prefix the method name with scope and use it like this:

// In the model
protected function scopeActive(Builder $query): void
{
    $query->where('status', 'active');
}

// Usage
Post::active()->get();

Laravel 12 introduced a native PHP attribute called #[Scope] that simplifies this:

#[Scope]
protected function active(Builder $query): void
{
    $query->where('status', 'active');
}

$users = User::active()->get();

No more scope prefix needed. It’s cleaner, modern, and easier to understand.

Collection::fromJson()

$electronics = '[
			{
				"id": 1,
				"name": "Apple iPhone 15 Pro",
				"category": "Smartphone",
				"brand": "Apple",
				"price": 1099.99,
				"in_stock": true,
			},
			{
				"id": 2,
				"name": "Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra",
				"category": "Smartphone",
				"brand": "Samsung",
				"price": 1199.99,
				"in_stock": true,
			}
		]';

Earlier, to convert a JSON string to a collection, you had to decode it first:

$output  = json_decode($electronics, true);
collect($output);    // old way

Now in Laravel 12.8, it’s even simpler:

Collection::fromJson($electronics);  // new way

This is a more expressive and elegant solution to handle JSON data directly as a Laravel Collection.