I am building a Laravel application on top of a MongoDB instance. For the ORM layer I am using the official MongoDB Driver / Eloquent Implementation.

The DB contains JSON documents that have been imported from an external service.
They all have a field called id, that (surprise!) is the primary key of the source. The key used by MongoDB of course, is _id.

It turns out it is next to impossible to retrieve documents by querying the id field using the Model classes, since in countless places in the underlying Builder implementation queries to a column id are translated to _id.

For example: MongoDBLaravelQueryBuilder::compileWheres()

// Compatibility with Eloquent queries that uses "id" instead of MongoDB's _id
if ($where['column'] === 'id') {
    $where['column'] = '_id';
}

This causes a query for id = 10000 to be rendered like this:

> MyModel::where('id', 10000)->toMql()
= [
    "find" => [
      [
        "_id" => 10000,
      ],
      [
        "typeMap" => [
          "root" => "object",
          "document" => "array",
        ],
      ],
    ],
  ]

As far as I can see, this affects all methods exposed by the Model class that can be used to retrieve models/documents. For some reason, they have not made this behavior optional.

I know I could probably rename or duplicate the id field(s) as a workaround, but somehow I think there must be some other way.

Have you by any chance encountered this problem and come up with a workable solution that does not involve writing queries by hand or forking the package (=D)?