How to deal with a date provided as an empty string

[Scumi]

What can I do when a date is provided as empty string during Data creation?

As far as I see, this package can deal with:

• date attribute not being provided at all (by setting property to Optional)
• date attribute being NULL (by setting property to null)
• date attribute being set in various formats (via Casts and Transformers)

However, when I receive data where a date is provided as an empty string, I get an error
Could not cast date `` into a `Carbon\Carbon` using formats: Y-m-d, d.m.Y

The incoming data is from an external API so I have no possibility of tampering with it before (other than ugly kludges).

[iamrgroot]

I think you should solve this using a custom cast: https://spatie.be/docs/laravel-data/v2/as-a-data-transfer-object/casts

Within the cast you can do anything you want with an empty string (convert to null, convert to now or whatever). For example, I use this cast to use Carbon::parse instead of a fixed format:

class CarbonParseCast extends Cast
{
    public function __construct(
        protected ?string $type = null,
    ) {
    }

    /**
     * @param array<string,mixed> $context
     */
    public function cast(DataProperty $property, mixed $value, array $context): DateTimeInterface|Uncastable
    {
        try {
            $type = $this->type ?? Carbon::class;

            return $type::parse($value);
        } catch (\Throwable $th) {
        }

        return Uncastable::create();
    }
}