assuming your "Thing" class is a model:

you don't need setThis and getThat methods on your model.

you can always get attributes defined on your table

$thing->id;
$thing->name;

you can set attributes as long as they are defined on the $fillable array on the model

$this->name = "new name";

There's also something called "mutators" in the model, where you can get an attribute value with a change,

public function getNameAttribute($value)
{
    return ucwords($value);
}

usage:

$thing->name; // returns ucwords value

The mutated attribute does not need to be a table column. say you have a user table with "first" and "last" name columns, you can create method getNameAttribute(),

public function getNameAttribute()
{
    return $this->first_name . $this->last_name;
}

To set values with a change use "accessors", say you have a field on the table "admission_date" here you convert it to UTC and store.

public function setAdmissionDateAttribute($value)
{
    $this->attributes['admission_date'] = Carbon::create($value, 'Asia/Jakarta')->setTimezone('UTC');
}

usage

$thing->admission_date; //sets the model value converted to UTC

https://www.laravel.com/docs/5.3/eloquent-mutators#

Hi,

sorry you misunderstood the question I think. It's not connected to a database table. I just want Thing->Attribute syntax eg $thing->score=50 which runs a setter function, in this case for a session value

i found out you could use setAttribute and getAttribute though, so this works by using Eloquent but not having it relate to a database table.

use Eloquent;

Class ThingSession extends Eloquent {

	public $name = "ThingSession";

	public function __construct() {
	}

	public function reset() {
		session()->forget($this->name);
	}

	public function forget($args) {
		foreach((array)$args as $field) {
			session()->forget($this->name.'.'.$field);
		};
	}

	public function getAttribute($name) {
		return session($this->name.'.'.$name);
	}

        // set eg ThingSession.score in session
	public function setAttribute($name, $value) {
		session([$this->name. '.'.$name => $value]);
	}

}

Then i call eg...

$thing = new ThingSession();
// sets score = 50 in ThingSession session array
$thing->score = 50;

// Laravel DebugBar will show eg

ThingSession array:1 [ "score" => 50 ]