Laravel 4 Form Validation should be unique on update form, but not if current

Question

I am trying to validate an update user profile form, whereby the validation should check that the email doesn't exist already, but disregard if the users existing email remains.

However, this continues to return validation error message 'This email has already been taken'.

I'm really unsure where I'm going wrong. Otherwise, the update form works and updates perfectly.

HTML

 {{ Form::text('email', Input::old('email', $user->email), array('id' => 'email', 'placeholder' => 'email', 'class' => 'form-control')) }}

Route

Route::post('users/edit/{user}', array('before' => 'admin', 'uses' => 'UserController@update'));

User Model

'email' => 'unique:users,email,{{{ $id }}}'

Happy

How is {{{ $id }}} getting replaced in your user model? – Illegitimacy

I used to have this working in my controller, however since I moved all validation to models, this doesn't. I am unsure how to pass the id to the model. Perhaps this is where it is failing – Happy

Answer 1

Your rule is written correctly in order to ignore a specific id, however, you'll need to update the value of {{{ $id }}} in your unique rule before attempting the validation.

I'm not necessarily a big fan of this method, but assuming your rules are a static attribute on the User object, you can create a static method that will hydrate and return the rules with the correct values.

class User extends Eloquent {
    public static $rules = array(
        'email' => 'unique:users,email,%1$s'
    );
    public static function getRules($id = 'NULL') {
        $rules = self::$rules;
        $rules['email'] = sprintf($rules['email'], $id);
        return $rules;
    }
}

Illegitimacy

Answer 2

You can accomplish this with the sometimes function of the validator

Something like:

$validator->sometimes('email', 'unique:users,email', function ($input) {
    return $input->email == Input::get('email');
});

See http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/validation#conditionally-adding-rules for more info

Cottingham