README

A nice bit of kit to help manage form-submissions in Laravel

Introduction

FormKit is a two-part package:

• FormKit\SubmissionKit dramatically streamlines the work you have to do on the back-end to manage data-submissions and forms
• FormKit\TemplateKit dramatically reduces the amount of front-end templating you have to do to build nice-looking forms using Blade & Bootstrap
• Together, a developer can get rapidly build out comprehensive solutions to manage all different kinds of data, then tweak on an as-needed basis

Installation

Recommended installation is via Composer:

composer require thehiredgun/formkit

or, add this to your composer.json:

"require": {
    ...,
    "thehiredgun/formkit": "^1.0",
    ...
}

SubmissionKit Quick-Start

For traditional Web Application use:

We're going to use a single(!) controller method to manage getting a form and handling a form-submission: In routes/web.php:

Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/books/{book}/edit', 'BookController@form');
Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/books/add', 'BookController@form');

Then, in app/Http/Controllers/BookController.php:

...
use App\Models\Eloquent\Book;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use TheHiredGun\FormKit\SubmissionKit\SubmissionKit;
...
    public function form(Request $request, Book $book = null)
    {
        // define your rules for the form.
        // multi-dimensional array is the preferred style, but you can use an array of strings, as well
        $rules = [
            'title' => [
                'required',
                'string',
            ],
            'author' => [
                'required',
                'string',
            ],
            'published_on' => [
                'required',
                'date_format:Y-m-d',
            ],
        ];
        $form = new SubmissionKit($request, $rules);
        // if the form has been submitted
        if ($request->isMethod('post')) {
            $form->validate();              // validate the form
            $form->setProperties($book);    // set the properties on the $book where the values are valid
            if ($form->isValid()) {
                $book->save();

                return redirect()->route('books');
            }
        }

        return view('books.form', [
            'book'   => $book,
            'errors' => $submissionKit->getErrors(),
        ]);
    }

SubmissionKit For RESTful API usage:

Here we'll use the SubmissionKit in two separate methods: one for POST, and one for PUT In routes/api.php:

Route::post('/books', 'BookController@post');
Route::put('/books/{book}', 'BookController@put');

And the BookController:

...
    public function post(Request $request)
    {
        $rules = [
            'title' => [
                'required',
                'string',
            ],
            'author' => [
                'required',
                'string',
            ],
            'published_on' => [
                'required',
                'date_format:Y-m-d',
            ],
        ];
        $form = new SubmissionKit($request, $rules);
        $form->validate();              // validate the form
        $form->setProperties(new Book());    // set the properties on the $book where the values are valid
        if ($form->isValid()) {
            $book->save();

            return response($book, 201);
        }

        return response([
            'errors' => $submissionKit->getErrors(),
        ], 400);
    }

    public function put(Request $request, Book $book)
    {
        $rules = [
            'title' => [
                'required',
                'string',
            ],
            'author' => [
                'required',
                'string',
            ],
            'published_on' => [
                'required',
                'date_format:Y-m-d',
            ],
        ];
        $form = new SubmissionKit($request, $rules);
        $form->validate();              // validate the form
        $form->setProperties($book);    // set the properties on the $book where the values are valid
        if ($form->isValid()) {
            $book->save();

            return response(200);
        }

        return response([
            'errors' => $submissionKit->getErrors(),
        ], 400);
    }