How to avoid infinite loop when extending a model which use the HasSettings trait

[felahdab]

Hi everyone.

First: thank you to all developer and contributors to this package which is very well done and practical.

I want to share a problem into which I ran with this package. It doesn't really qualify as a bug. It's not about a feature request neither.

Long story short:
In a project I am working on, I have included this package and I am using the nWidart/laravel-modules package.

In order to separate concerns, I have models from different modules which extend models from other modules or from the base namespace (App\Models).

I faced the following situation:

• model App\Models\User uses HasSettingsTable (and therefore HasSettings trait also).
• model Modules\HR\Entities\Person extends the User module

When doing that without more precaution, I faced an infinite loop and therefore a sudden and silent application crash, when calling any method on the Person model resulting in a query having to be built and executed.

This infinite loop was coming from the HasSettings trait way of overriding the __call method in order to catch the $invokeSettingsby property when it is set.

In particular, in that method, the use of call_user_func(get_parent_class($this) . '::__call', $name, $args); triggers the infinite loop.
I presume that since the Person model already extends the User model, but doesn't override the __call method which is already a method of get_parent_class($this), the call_user_func is actually calling itself.

Even if it made itself visible when building a query from the inherited model, many other uses of that same model would have resulted in the infinite loop.

I am unsure as to why the call_user_func syntax was used in order to forward the calls to parent classes in HasSettings.
Changing this line to parent::__call($name, $args) seemed to work equally well (but I didn't go thru complete tests and might have missed something).

But I didn't want to change the module code so I resorted to another way of resolving this issue without having to change the HasSettings code :
I simply override the __call method in the Person model like so:

public function __call($name, $args)
{
        parent::__call($name, $args)
}

And by doing just that, since I make sure that the HasSettings __call method is called at the User level of inheritance, the infinite loop doesn't happen.

In conclusion:

• if anyone encounters a sudden silent application crash when using this module, it might have to do with an infinite loop caused by the supercharging of the __call method.
• maybe the syntax parent::__call($name, $args) would do equally well for the laravel-model-settings package, which I leave to the developpers to figure out.
• I hope that my trouble and this explanation will save some time for others.

Regards.