eager loading: $this new model

[theticraft]

Description

I wanted to get all users of a role (with the belongsToMany Relationship) and got an error stating Class name must be a valid object or a string. After a bit of debug, I noticed that $this inside the users() function was a completely new model (like when you call new Role()). However, before calling users(), I dumped $role and it was the correct Role with every attribute. By calling $role->users()->get(), all the users were displayed...

Steps To Reproduce

1. add Model::automaticallyEagerLoadRelationships(); to AppServiceProvider.php
2. try to access ->users not the function; as a parameter
3. get Class name must be a valid object or a string, because $this->exists is false, $this->guard_name is sanctum, because it's default, and is a new Role

Version of spatie/laravel-permission package:

6.21.0

Version of laravel/framework package:

v12.28.1

PHP version:

8.2.29

Database engine and version:

MariaDB 10.6.22

OS: Windows/Mac/Linux version:

linux

[shotwn]

My Story

I found this issue as I was debugging a similar problem.

I was getting the same error with $role->delete(). Because during the delete operation model was trying to load users.

In my application $role->attributes['guard_name'] which is being used by $role->users relationship was showing sanctum in controllers even though $guard_name and getDefaultGuardName() are set as web in User model.

When I used a seeder to setup everything, all was fine. Guard was defaulting to the web.

But when I was creating a Role or Permission through a Controller it was defaulting to the guard_name to sanctum. Which is not a guard name I configured in my application, because even though I use sanctum it uses web guard domain by default.

So when I was trying to delete a Role created with "sanctum" guard, it was failing because it was not able to find the User class name tied to the non-existing "sanctum" guard.

The Fix

The fix was to make sure creating all roles with an existing guard. Web in my case.

You might want to scan your guards or debug the guard_name.

Recommendation

As a safeguard a check can be added to Permission or Role creation to make sure the detected guard is correct and corresponds to a User model.