Tag: Laravel

How to easily set a custom redirect in Laravel form requests

In Laravel you can create custom request classes where you can house the validation for any given route. If that validation then fails, Laravel’s default action is to redirect the visitor back to the previous page. This is commonly used for when a form is submitted incorrectly – The visitor will be redirected back to said form to correct the errors. Sometimes, however, you may wish to redirect the visitor to a different location altogether.

TL;DR (Too long; didn’t read)

At the top of your custom request class, add one of the following protected properties and give it your required value. I have given example values to demonstrate:

protected $redirect = '/custom-page'; // Any URL or path
protected $redirectRoute = 'pages.custom-page'; // The named route of the page
protected $redirectAction = 'PagesController@customPage'; // The controller action to use.

This will then redirect your visitor to that location should they fail any of the validation checks within your custom form request class.

Explaination

When you create a request class through the Laravel artisan command, it will create one that extends the base Laravel class Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest. Within this class the three protected properties listed above are initialised from line 33, but not set to a value.

Then further down the page of the base class, on line 127 at the time of writing, there is a protected method called getRedirectUrl. This method performs a series of checks for whether or not any of the three redirect properties have actually been set. The first one it finds to be set by you, in the order given above, is the one that will be used as the custom redirect location.

Here is that getRedirectUrl method for your convenience:

/**
* Get the URL to redirect to on a validation error.
*
* @return string
*/
protected function getRedirectUrl()
{
    $url = $this->redirector->getUrlGenerator();

    if ($this->redirect) {
        return $url->to($this->redirect);
    } elseif ($this->redirectRoute) {
        return $url->route($this->redirectRoute);
    } elseif ($this->redirectAction) {
        return $url->action($this->redirectAction);
    }

    return $url->previous();
}

Do you have any extra tips to add to this? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks.

Laravel Blade push and stack

Laravel’s blade view compiler is second to none. I’ve used a couple of different templating engines and blade is by far my favourite.

Including Partials

The way in which we include partials of views within our main views is as follows:
@include(‘partials.my-first-partial’)
It will inject that partial’s content in the specified place.

Defining Sections

Within our views, we define “sections” with the following syntax:

@section(‘section_name’)

    The section’s content within here

@stop

And we can define as many sections as we need for our project.

When the same section is used in multiple places within one compilation

Imagine we have master template file as such:

// layouts.main.blade.php
<!doctype html>

...
@yield(‘partials.form’)
...

@yield(‘custom_scripts’)

Let’s suppose we have the following layout template that extends our main layout one and is including three partials. This example is a form template including its various inputs from separate partials. For my own website I have a different form for each of my post types and so I have the inputs in separate partials for easy reuse.

// partials.form.blade.php
@extends(‘layouts.main’)

<form>@include(‘parials.form-title’)
@include(‘parials.form-content’)
@include(‘parials.form-tags’)</form>

Let’s next suppose that in a couple of those partial input views you need to inject some custom scripting. This is a slightly contrived example, but it will illustrate the point.

// partials.form-content.blade.php
<textarea class="content" name="content"></textarea>

@section(‘custom_scripts’)
// dummy javascript as example
$(‘.content’).doSomething();
@stop

// partials.form-tags.blade.php
<select class="tags" name="tags">
<option value="tagone">Tag One</option>
<option value="tagtwo">Tag Two</option>
<option value="tagthree">Tag Three</option>
</select>

@section(‘custom_scripts’)
$(‘.tags’).doSomethingElse()
@stop

Now, when the form page gets compiled, only the first occurrence of the ‘custom_scripts’ section will be included.

So what if you needed to be able to define this section in chunks across partials?

Introducing Blade’s Push & Stack directives

To give this functionality, Laravel does in fact have two little-known directives called ‘push’ and ‘stack’.

They allow you to ‘stack up’ items across partials with the ‘push’ directive, which can then be echoed out together with the ‘stack’ directive.

Here’s the above form example but with ‘push’ and ‘stack’ used in place of ‘section’ and ‘yield’.

// layouts.main.blade.php
<!doctype html>

...
@yield(‘partials.form’)
...

@stack(‘custom_scripts’)


// partials.form-content.blade.php
<textarea class="content" name="content"></textarea>

@push(‘custom_scripts’)
// dummy javascript as example
$(‘.content’).doSomething();
@endpush

// partials.form-tags.blade.php
<select class="tags" name="tags">
<option value="tagone">Tag One</option>
<option value="tagtwo">Tag Two</option>
<option value="tagthree">Tag Three</option>
</select>

@push(‘custom_scripts’)
$(‘.tags’).doSomethingElse()
@endpush

This will now compile all uses of the @push(‘custom_scripts’) and echo them out as one wherever you call @stack(‘custom_scripts’)

When I was shown this technique by a mate at work, it blew my mind.

Have fun.

Updated to PHP7 and got white screen where was fine before. It was @laravelphp blade comment block causing. Deleting comment block fixed it. Just mentioned in case anybody else had a similar issue.

Normally, with Laravel (@laravelphp on Twitter), if you create a model and use the “-m” or “–migration” flag to create the accompanying migration, it will pluralize the table.

So for example “User” model will use a “users” table; “Vehicle” model will use a “vehicles” table.

I just discovered however, that if you create a “Data” model, the table will also be created as “data” – not “datas”. It makes complete sense as datas isn’t a word.

I love using this framework.

On rethinking my database structure

I’ve been using Laravel for my personal website for about eight months now and haven’t looked back since.

This huge advantage to my rebuilding it in that way — from its original WordPress foundations — was that I had a crash course in using Laravel as well as learning some best practices as well.

Now that I have been using my site daily for all this time, I have found places where it has got messy — unavoidable through the learning experience — as well as places where I want to refine how I publish.

At the moment I am using what are called explicit post types. Meaning that I manually choose which post type a particular post belongs to before publishing — picking the appropriate create form to publish from.

However I have been thinking more and more about implicit post types — post types whose contents define what sort of post it is. Going the way of implicit may also see me abolishing the need for post-type-specific areas of my site.

I could still do this to some degree I suppose. e.g. If a post doesn’t have a title, it’s a note; If it has a location, it’s a checkin; etc.

The only way to see how this is going to go is to build it and actually publish with it for a while, I guess.

Update 8th February 2021: I now use WordPress for my website and have done for a few years now.

Rewriting my database structure is proving more work than first thought. Still – I’ve learnt some new Laravel stuff which is always good. So even if it never ends up being used, it’s not been a wasted exercise.

Bypassing Laravel’s CSRF Middleware on selected routes (from 5.1)

A handy way to have some of your routes skip the middleware for CSRF protection. Handy in some situations.

Laravel does a great job at protecting us from cross-site request forgeries – or C.S.R.F. for short.But sometimes you may not wish to have that layer present. Well with Laravel 5.1 you can very easily bypass this middleware, simply by populating an array in the following file:

app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php

Within this class you can add a protected property — an array — called $except, which will tell Laravel to use this middleware except for the ones you specify here.

A complete example could be:

protected $except = [
    'ignore/this/url',
    'this/one/too',
    'and/this',
];

So for those three URLs, the CSRF middleware would be skipped.