title: How to create empty instance of Laravel Eloquent entity
body: <p>I have the Laravel PHP code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>class Contract extends Model
  {
      public $table = "CONTRACTS";
      public $timestamps = false;
      protected $primaryKey = 'ID';
      protected $fillable = array("ID", "CONTRACT_DATE", "PRICE_TYPE", "AMOUNT");
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I would like Laravel controller to have special method that returns empty instance of Contracts entity as json object. The idea is that Laravels's code make all the necessary default assignments to this entity (e.g. ID from the generator, default price type according to user preferences, default currency according to region and so on) and returns entity that can be usable from Javascript interface. Javascript interface later will decided whether to discard this entity of whether to continue with this entity and to finally save (insert) it with the appropriate insert method or Laravelt REST API.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is - <strong>how to create empty instance of Laravel model?</strong> E.g.  </p>
  
  <pre><code>class Contracts extends Controller
      public function create() {
          $contract = new Contract;
          return json_encode($contract);
      } 
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>code simply returns </p>
  
  <pre><code>[]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I would like to have something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{"ID":1111,
   "CONTRACT_DATE":null,
   "PRICE_TYPE":"2",
   "AMOUNT":0.0}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is that possible with Laravel. One solution could be use of raw SQL that returns empty values and then one can hope that Laravel can translate this SQL into object...</p>