Laravel 8.X validation on attributes that contain a certain string - php

Question

I'm trying to make an application that saves grocery lists and retrieves them from a database. In the request, the values get passed along in JSON format:
"item:47" => "{"id":47,"name":"Beer","brand":"Jupiler","weight":null,"note":"Six pack;_bottles","order_id":15}"
"item:88" => "{"id":88,"name":"Tomatoes","brand":null,"weight":null,"note":null,"order_id":15}"
"item:110" => "{"id":110,"name":"Gura_Bread","brand":null,"weight":0.3,"note":null,"order_id":15}"
"item:-1" => "{"id":-1,"name":"Beef_Jerky","brand":"Canadon","weight":0.5,"notes":"Spicy_Ones"}"
New items are marked with a descending negative id, while existing items retain their id from the DB
When this arrives in the back-end of the laravel application, I would like to validate the JSON string with Laravel's validate(). The only problem is that the amount of items that can be passed varies in amount. Sometimes it can be one item, while other times it could be 10 items instead.
Is there a way to add this JSON rule that could only trigger when it notices that there's a certain string in one or multiple attributes of an incoming request? In this case, it should trigger when it sees that the string item:.
For context, here are the parameters of an example request.
"picking_method" => "Cheapest"
"item:47" => "{"id":47,"name":"Beer","brand":"Jupiler","weight":null,"note":"Six pack;_bottles","order_id":15}"
"item:88" => "{"id":88,"name":"Tomatoes","brand":null,"weight":null,"note":null,"order_id":15}"
"item:110" => "{"id":110,"name":"Gura_Bread","brand":null,"weight":0.3,"note":null,"order_id":15}"
"item:-1" => "{"id":-1,"name":"Beef_Jerky","brand":"Canadon","weight":0.5,"notes":"Spicy_Ones"}"
"store_street" => "Haag Pines"
"store_number" => "1855"
"store_postal_code" => "82792-01"
"store_city" => "Port Muhammadhaven"
"store_country" => "Guernsey"
"delivery_street" => "Rosenbaum Island"
"delivery_number" => "4974"
"delivery_postal_code" => "61093"
"delivery_city" => "East Carlee"
"delivery_country" => "Slovenia"
"delivery_notes" => null
"medical_notes" => null

Answer 1

After experimenting some more, I came up with this solution.
In order for this method to work, you'll need to have a substring that is the same across all the attributes that you want to check.
Before performing any validation at all, I decided to collect all the attributes that I want to check into an array with a foreach loop. This is where the substring part is important because it will be used to decide which attributes will be collected:
$item_attributes = [];
foreach ($request->post() as $key => $value) {
if (str_contains($key, 'item:')) {
array_push($item_attributes, $key);
}
}
After that, I looped over the $item_attributes array and used it to make a rules array, where every value in the $item_attributes is used as a key. As value, I added the json rule.
$rules = [];
foreach ($item_attributes as $attribute) {
$rules[$attribute] = "json";
}
After that, I validate the data and returned it, so it can be used in the main function of my code:
return $request->validate($rules);
When combined, this will result into the following method:
function validateItems(Request $request)
{
$item_attributes = [];
foreach ($request->post() as $key => $value) {
if (str_contains($key, 'item:')) {
array_push($item_attributes, $key);
}
}
$rules = [];
foreach ($item_attributes as $attribute) {
$rules[$attribute] = "json";
}
return $request->validate($rules);
}