Consider a production Laravel application that needs to use Date and datetime casts. How should the developer approach the requirement, and what should be checked before releasing it?

Consider a production Laravel application that needs to use Date and datetime casts. How should the developer approach the requirement, and what should be checked before releasing it? Assume the system receives real users, real data and concurrent requests. The correct approach is to identify where date and datetime casts belongs, define its inputs and outputs, protect the boundary with validation and authorization where applicable, consider database and performance implications, and add automated tests for the expected behavior. Concept-specific reasoning: Date-related casts turn persisted date values into convenient date objects supported by the framework. A useful implementation pattern is: protected function casts(): array { return [ 'is_active' => 'boolean', 'settings' => 'array', ]; }