Hello,

You can add attributes on models that do not have a corresponding column in your database, look at the end of the Eloquent documentation : This is a link But you cant orderBy on it, just sortBy.

Yeah, that's part of the solution. But I need to basically provide this query when searching for a user:

SELECT *, CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) as full_name FROM users GROUP BY full_name

I got it working to a point where I append the column to the select, but then it wipes out any custom definition of columns from the get() or first() method, and I always return a * plus all the concatencated fields, which is not ideal.

The idea was to return the concatencated fields plus anything a user specifies in the get() or first() method.

You can try using

DB::raw("CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) as full_name")

see documentation for more.

Yup, I did that already before, had an issue on how to append it in every query.

Everything is now well implemented in my Laravel Concatenator package.

https://github.com/slovenianGooner/concatenator