Issue with _id to id conversion when upgrading to laravel-mongodb v5 (Laravel 12 support)

[daniel_scout (Daniel Hernandez)]

@tespindola

I’m in the process of upgrading the laravel-mongodb package to version 5 in order to support Laravel 12. However, I’ve encountered a couple of issues related to the automatic conversion of _id fields to id.

Problems:

1. rename_embedded_id_field = false has no effect
   According to the documentation, setting rename_embedded_id_field to false should prevent the package from renaming _id fields to id. Unfortunately, this configuration seems to be ignored entirely. Regardless of how it’s set, the _id fields are always renamed to id.
2. Unexpected renaming in aggregation pipelines
   When using raw queries with aggregation (like $group), the _id field is also being automatically renamed to id. This seems unintended and problematic, especially when working with grouped results. Here’s an example:

$content = Model::raw(function ($collection) { 
    return $collection->aggregate([
        ['$group' => ['_id' => ['id' => '$brand_id', 'name' => '$brand_name'], 'count' => ['$sum' => 1]]],
        ['$sort' => ['count' => -1]]
    ], ["allowDiskUse" => true]);
})->toArray();

When accessing the result:

$content['_id']; // Throws an exception: index does not exist
$content['id'];  // This works instead

This forced me to go through all my aggregation queries and manually adjust the references to _id, which is both tedious and error-prone.

just want to make sure that you added this setting under config/database.php for the rename_embedded_id_field to take affect.
or if you did: \MongoDB\Connection::setRenameEmbeddedIdField(false);

(this was introduced in 5.3 btw)