Laravel Best Practices: When a JSON Column Makes More Sense

Imagine you’re building a user profile system, and users can customize two things:

1. Email notifications — should they receive emails?
2. Dark mode & text size — personal display preferences.

At first, you might add both settings as columns:

Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->boolean('email_notifications')->default(true);
    $table->boolean('dark_mode')->default(false);
    $table->string('text_size')->default('medium');
});

This works, but as more UI preferences are added (e.g., font choice, layout style), the table can become cluttered.

Instead of storing every user setting as a separate column, we can keep essential settings like email_notifications in dedicated columns (since they need to be filterable) and move personal preferences (like dark_mode and text_size) into a JSON column:

Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->boolean('email_notifications')->default(true); // Needs to be filterable  
    $table->json('settings')->nullable(); // Stores UI settings  
});

Querying Users with Filterable Columns

If you need to retrieve all users who have email notifications enabled, you can do so efficiently:

$users = User::where('email_notifications', true)->get();

It only remains to understand, how to get/set the json content in settings.

Handling JSON Data in the settings Column

First, make sure that the settings column is converted to an array. Inside the users model, add

protected $casts = [
        'settings' => 'array',
    ];

Now, for each column, we create methods to get and to update teh values. For example:

 public function isDarkMode(): bool
    {
        return $this->settings['dark_mode'] ?? true;
    }

    public function updateDarkMode(bool $value): void
    {
        $this->settings = array_merge($this->settings ?? [], [
            'dark_mode' => $value,
        ]);
    }

This approach allows us to continuously add new settings without modifying the migration. It’s particularly useful when a default setting applies to most users (which is used if no specific value is set) and when there is no need for efficient filtering of this attribute within the application.