Passing Laravel Collection to Vue - json

Question

I am trying to return customers from model Customer where id < 10. I do have some in the database.
$customers = Customer::where('id', '<', 10)->get();
return json_encode(['customers' => $customers]);
The above code will error out "Trailing data"
and when I try to dd($customers), I get a list of the collection Customer
I have no idea why I keep getting that and why the model is returning raw collection and not an object of the list of customers???
It seems like a null date "updated_at" field is causing the error. don't know why!
Solved By:
on the Customer model I had to do:
//ask Laravel to not manage default date columns
public $timestamps = false;
also I to mutate those columns:
public function setDateRemindedAttribute($value)
{
if (strlen($value)) {
$this->attributes['date_reminded'] = Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $value);
} else {
$this->attributes['date_reminded'] = null;
}
}
public function setUpdatedAtAttribute($value)
{
if (strlen($value)) {
$this->attributes['updated_at'] = Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $value);
} else {
$this->attributes['updated_at'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'];
}
}

Answer 1

Use response()->json() like this
$customers = Customer::where('id', '<', 10)->get();
return response()->json(['customers' => $customers]);