Mohammed Said has a new post to his site sharing how you can add validators conditionally in Laravel based on different requirements using the "sometimes" method.

Laravel's validation library is very powerful and easy to use, using a few keystrokes you can build a strong defence around your application, preventing invalid user input from corrupting the application flow and potentially introducing bugs.

In this post I'd like to highlight a trick related to conditionally adding validation rules, this trick is specially important since I've seen many people on Laravel's GitHub repository opening issues complaining about an un-expected validator behaviour.

He sets up a simple scenario where the "subject" value is required allowing for a custom value but validating the length if custom is selected. He then shows how to modify things to use the "sometimes" method for conditional checks for the same "custom" checking. He also shows how to pass in multiple fields and how to evaluate a "model exists" for a user.