Dual Purpose Customised Request

Naturally when you customise the Request it can only serve one purpose. That is to validate a series of rules and return specified error messages, on data held in the $request object.

I feel there is no point in demonstrating a generic code example not when you have already most likely have experience in the customization, anyway.

To save me some time I use a switch inside the rules class method. You switch either on one set of rules or the other based on the request being POST or PUT.

Here is an example.

public function rules(Request $request)
    {
        switch ($this->method()) {
            case 'POST':
                return [
                    'title'=>  
                    [
                        'required'
                      , 'string'
                    ]
                  , 'topic'=>  
                    [
                        'required'
                      , 'string'
                    ]
                  , // etc...
                ];
                break;
            case 'PUT':
                return [
                    'title'                         =>  
                    [
                        'required'
                      , 'string'
                    ]
                  , 'topic'                         =>  
                    [
                        'required'
                      , 'string'
                    ]
                  , 'id'                          =>
                    [
                        'required'
                      , 'string'
                    ]
                  , // etc...
                ];
                break;
        }
    }

   public function messages()
    {
        switch ($this->method()) {
            case 'POST':
                return [
                    'title.required'                 =>  'Enter a post title'
                  , 'topic.required'                 =>  'Enter a post topic'
                  , // etc...
                ];
                break;
            case 'PUT':
                return [
                    'title.required'                 =>  'Enter a post title'
                  , 'topic.required'                 =>  'Enter a post topic'
                  , 'id.required'                 =>  'Primary key missing'
                  , // etc...
                ];
                break;
        }

The POST is the when you create a new row of data, and the PUT (or PATCH if you prefer) for when you have a record to update.

That's all there is to it really, you have dual purpose increasing your productivity too.