Handling Forms and Validation in Laravel

1. Introduction

In this tutorial, we will learn how to handle forms and validate user input in Laravel. Laravel provides a powerful validation feature out-of-the-box, ensuring the integrity of user-submitted data.

What will you learn:
- Creating basic forms in Laravel
- Laravel's built-in validation features
- Validating form data

Prerequisites:
- Basic knowledge of PHP
- Basic understanding of Laravel
- Laravel environment setup

2. Step-by-Step Guide

Forms are a fundamental aspect of any web application, enabling users to input data. Laravel makes it easy to validate this data before it is saved to your database.

Laravel's Validation Feature

Laravel's validation feature provides a simple and convenient way to validate incoming HTTP request with a variety of powerful validation rules.

Creating a Basic Form

A basic form in Laravel can be created using the Blade templating engine. Blade is a simple, yet powerful templating engine provided with Laravel.

3. Code Examples

Example 1: Creating a Basic Form

In your blade file, you can create a form like this:

<form method="POST" action="/submit">
    @csrf
    <label for="name">Name:</label><br>
    <input type="text" id="name" name="name"><br>
    <label for="email">Email:</label><br>
    <input type="text" id="email" name="email"><br>
    <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

Example 2: Form Validation

Laravel makes it easy to perform validation on incoming data. Let's validate the data we received from the form.

public function store(Request $request)
{
    $request->validate([
        'name' => 'required|max:255',
        'email' => 'required|email',
    ]);

    // The incoming request is valid...

    // Retrieve the validated input data...
    $validated = $request->validated();
}

In this code snippet, required|max:255 means the name field is required and must not exceed 255 characters. required|email means the email field is required and must be a valid email address. If the validation fails, the user will be redirected back to the form.

4. Summary

In this tutorial, we learned how to create a basic form in Laravel and how to use Laravel's built-in validation feature to validate the form data. The next step would be to learn how to save this data to a database.

5. Practice Exercises

1. Create a form with more fields and validate the data.
2. Try out more validation rules provided by Laravel.
3. Create a custom validation rule.

Additional Resources
- Laravel's Validation Documentation
- Laravel's Blade Documentation

Practice Exercises Solutions

1. This is an open-ended exercise. You can add any fields you like to the form and validate them using Laravel's validation rules.
2. Laravel provides a variety of validation rules. You can find them in the Laravel's Validation Documentation.
3. Creating a custom validation rule involves creating a new rule class. This can be done using the make:rule Artisan command. The passes method of the rule class is used to validate the attribute value. The message method should return the validation error message that should be used when validation fails. You can find more information in the Laravel's Validation Documentation.