Use Laravel 5 Form Request validation with related models - php

Question

I'm using (and loving) the Laravel 5 form request validation so far. But now I'm stuck trying to validate related models.
Say I have a Car model which has many Wheel models and I'd like to validate a new car. In the CarController#store method I'm using the following to validate the car, but this does of course not validate the wheels.
public function store(StoreCarRequest $request)
{
// Create the car
}
What needs to be done to validate the Wheels of a Car? Can this be done with form request validation?
Edit
I'm getting closer. The remaining issue is that I need to iterate through the wheels which are stored in an array (because the HTML input name is e.g. wheels[0][color]), but the validator is searching for a color field, not wheels[0][color].
public function store(StoreCarRequest $r)
{
// Validate the wheels
foreach ($r->input('wheels') as $wheel)
{
// TODO: use $wheel somewhere?
$snr = new StoreWheelRequest;
$this->validate($r, $snr->rules()); // Validation fails: 'color' field is required
}
// Validation passed, create the car (and the wheels)
}
StoreCarRequest.php
public function rules()
{
return [
'engine' => 'required',
'seats' => 'required',
];
}
StoreWheelRequest.php
public function rules()
{
return [
'color' => 'required',
];
}
The HTML form
<form method="POST" action="...">
<input type="text" name="engine">
<input type="text" name="seats">
<input type="text" name="wheels[0][color]">
<input type="text" name="wheels[1][color]">
<input type="text" name="wheels[2][color]">
<input type="text" name="wheels[3][color]">
<input type="submit" value="Create">
</form>

Answer 1

After some more Googling, I stumbled upon the following article: http://ericlbarnes.com/laravel-array-validation/
It boils down to adding rules dynamically inside the rules() method by iterating over the input array.

Answer 2

You can use dot notation to validate nested arrays :
public function rules()
{
return [
'engine' => 'required',
'seats' => 'required',
'wheel.color' => 'required',
];
}