Model collections

[CodeTechNL]

Hi! Lets say you have multiple product variants in a model called Variant. When retrieving a bunch of them $variants = Variant::all() will return a (without autocomplete in my head) \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection. If we want to sum the total stock of those items we can use $variants->sum('stock_level'). What I always do for each model, I override the newCollection method and return a specific collection for those models: VariantCollection. So now when I retrieve my variants, I can use a method $variants->getStockLevel(). Example code:

<?php

    use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection;
    use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

    class VariantCollection extends Collection
    {
        public function getStockLevel()
        {
            return $this->sum('stock_level');
        }
    }

    class Variant extends Model
    {
        public function newCollection(array $models = []): VariantCollection
        {
            return new VariantCollection($models);
        }
    }

Isn't the following method not much easier and cleaner?

<?php

    use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection;

    class VariantCollection extends Collection
    {
        public function getStockLevel()
        {
            return $this->sum('stock_level');
        }
    }
    
    class Variant extends Model
    {
        protected string $collectionClass = VariantCollection::class;
    }

    /**
     * The original model as in \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model 
     */
    class Model
    {
        /**
         * @var string 
         */
        protected string $collectionClass = Collection::class;

        /**
         * @param array $models
         * @return mixed
         */
        public function newCollection(array $models = [])
        {
            return new $this->collectionClass($models);
        }
    }

With this method you don't need to override the whole method