title: Passing an attribute to Eloquent model constructor
body: <p>Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but I'm coming from the world of PDO and I'm used to be able to pass arguments to a class that a row is instantiated into and then that constructor will set a field dynamically for me. How is this achieved with Eloquent?</p>
  
  <pre><code>// Old way
  
  $dm = new DataModel('value');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>DataModel.php</p>
  
  <pre><code>class DataModel() {
     function __construct($value = null) {
        $this-&gt;value = $value;
     }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've read that Eloquent provides you with a <code>::create()</code> method but I don't want to save the record at this stage.</p>
  
  <p>The issue here is that Eloquent has its own constructor and I'm not sure my model can override that constructor completely.</p>