Custom validation rules and messages in Laravel form requests
If you want to validate request fields in Laravel, you could use Illuminate\Http\Request’s validate method where you can specify all the fields that you would want to get validated inside controller’s action. You can do it like so.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
class PostController extends Controller
{
/**
* Store a new blog post.
*
* @param Request $request
* @return Response
*/
public function store(Request $request)
{
$validatedData = $request->validate([
'title' => 'required|unique:posts|max:255',
'body' => 'required',
'author.name' => 'required',
]);
// The blog post is valid...
}
}
As you can see, we’ve specified validation rules on title and body fields and until these validation rules are matched, the request won’t get processed further.
But problem here is the controller action can quickly get bloated if there are many fields that you want to get validated. How can you make it a little cleaner and nicer?
Using FormRequest class
Well, you can do this with using Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest which is basically a custom request class that contain validation logic upon extended.
First off, you’ll need to create a form request class. In order to do so, you’ll need to run following artisan command.
$ php artisan make:request PostRequest
Upon running above command, a PostRequest will get generated in app/Http/Requests which extends Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest. This is how the PostRequest would look like.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Requests;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest;
class PostRequest extends FormRequest
{
/**
* Determine if the user is authorized to make this request.
*
* @return bool
*/
public function authorize()
{
return false;
}
/**
* Get the validation rules that apply to the request.
*
* @return array
*/
public function rules()
{
return [
//
];
}
}
In order to add validation rules, you’d need to override rules() method like so.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Requests;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest;
class PostRequest extends FormRequest
{
/**
* Get the validation rules that apply to the request.
*
* @return array
*/
public function rules()
{
return [
'title' => 'required|unique:posts|max:255',
'body' => 'required',
'author.name' => 'required',
];
}
}
Now, you can replace the Request with PostRequest in the controller, in the first example of the article like so.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use App\Http\Requests\PostRequest;
class PostController extends Controller
{
/**
* Store a new blog post.
*
* @param Request $request
* @return Response
*/
public function store(PostRequest $request)
{
// The blog post is valid...
}
}
As you can see, we’ve removed the custom validation from the controller’s action as we’re using the PostRequest in order to build the $request object, which will ultimately take care of the validation of request fields that we’ve setup. The action is now much more cleaner and less bloated!
Customizing Validation Messages
Apart from setting up validation rules, you can also customize validation messages in the form request classes. For this, you’ll need to override messages() method like so.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Requests;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest;
class PostRequest extends FormRequest
{
public function rules()
{
return [
'title' => 'required|unique:posts|max:255',
'body' => 'required',
'author.name' => 'required',
];
}
public function messages()
{
return [
'title.reuired' => 'A nice title is required for the post.',
'body.required' => 'Please add content for the post.',
];
}
}
And upon validating title and body fields, the messages specified in the messages() will get displayed instead of the Laravel’s default validation messages.
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