Laravel comes with API Resources to map an Eloquent object into a response. But what about the request? After struggling with this for a long time, I’m finally happy to introduce Bag! 1- The Test In previous posts I’ve said how much of a TDD lover I am. I feel like it’s easier to discuss the problems of an implementation if I know how I’m going to be interacting with it. Let’s start with the test. Simple create process, yet would not work because a) we want to hash the password and b) the database column is called and not . $administrator->create($request->validated()) department_id department 2- Transforming a Form Request into a Bag Form Requests are great classes for validating input data. After validating, we could use it to transform the input into something that Eloquent would understand. Here is a snippet for that. Instead of using from the Controller, we can now transform the request into a Data Bag by calling . The will be responsible for doing all sorts of input transformation that we desire. Check it out: $request->validated() $request->toBag() bag 3- Wrapping up — The Handler As always, the Request Handler will type-hint the Form Request for Laravel to auto-validate the input data. If everything goes well, we can transform that data into a bag of validated data and pass it to Eloquent. 4- Green tests! This implementation satisfy the test described in step 1. This finally satisfied my desire to keep a clean and intuitive API Request decoupled from the database structure in the same way that API Response can be transformed without requiring database changes.
