Validation

Laravel provides several different approaches to validate your application's incoming data. By default, Laravel's base controller class uses a ValidatesRequests trait which provides a convenient method to validate incoming HTTP request with a variety of powerful validation rules.

Both unique and exists validation rules, require the database to be queried. This packages provides this integration.

Unique

The field under validation must be unique for a given Entity. If the column option is not specified, the field name will be used.

/**
 * Store a new blog post.
 *
 * @param  Request  $request
 * @return Response
 */
public function store(Request $request)
{
    $this->validate($request, [
        'username' => 'required|unique:App\User,username',
    ]);
}

Forcing A Unique Rule To Ignore A Given ID:

Sometimes, you may wish to ignore a given ID during the unique check. For example, consider an "update profile" screen that includes the user's name, e-mail address, and location. Of course, you will want to verify that the e-mail address is unique. However, if the user only changes the name field and not the e-mail field, you do not want a validation error to be thrown because the user is already the owner of the e-mail address. You only want to throw a validation error if the user provides an e-mail address that is already used by a different user. To tell the unique rule to ignore the user's ID, you may pass the ID as the third parameter:

'email' => 'unique:users,email_address,'.$user->id

Adding Additional Where Clauses:

You may also specify more conditions that will be added as "where" clauses to the query:

'email' => 'unique:users,email_address,NULL,id,account_id,1'

In the rule above, only rows with an account_id of 1 would be included in the unique check.

Exists

The field under validation must exist on a given database table.

/**
 * Store a new blog post.
 *
 * @param  Request  $request
 * @return Response
 */
public function update($id, Request $request)
{
    $this->validate($request, [
        'username' => 'required|exists:App\User,username',
    ]);
}