Reformulator

Laravel middleware to filter, sanitize, parse and transform request input data.

Note: I’d recommend using
Laravel’s FormRequests
instead of this package’s middleware if you wish to manipulate the incomming request before validation and other processing.
Your intentions will be easier to understand if manipulation is done in your customized
prepareForValidation() method
of your FormRequest instead of hidden away in a middleware declared who knows where.

Also, since Laravel 5.4 there are already middleware for trimming strings and converting empty strings to null applied by default, so this package has been superfluous for quite some time.

Installation & Configuration

composer require fewagency/laravel-reformulator

Register each middleware you want to use in the $routeMiddleware array
in app/Http/Kernel.php of your Laravel app:

'reformulator.trim' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\TrimInput::class,
'reformulator.strip_repeats' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\StripRepeatNonWordCharsFromInput::class,
'reformulator.filter' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\FilterInput::class,
'reformulator.remove_empty' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\RemoveEmptyInput::class,
'reformulator.clean_array' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\CleanArrayInput::class,
'reformulator.concatenate' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\ConcatenateInput::class,
'reformulator.explode' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\ExplodeInput::class,
'reformulator.datetime-local' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\DatetimeLocalInput::class,
'reformulator.datetime' => \FewAgency\Reformulator\Middleware\DatetimeInput::class,

Usage and parameters to each middleware is currently documented in each of the classes
but in general, most of them take a list of field names as middleware parameters.

Read more in the Laravel docs for middleware.

Principles

Some would argue that it’s not a good idea to mutate the Request object, for examples see
GrahamCampbell’s comments on Laravel issue 10725.

My opinion is that it makes sense to modify data in the request when:

• The same transformations could instead have been done on the client side before submitting,
  or substitutes a shortcoming in the transmission method
  (e.g. it’s not possible to submit an empty array)
• The transformations absolutely can’t go against the user’s intention
  (as we’re not giving the user a chance to approve the change)
• The transformations doesn’t break repopulating the view (i.e. form)

Listen to
Full Stack Radio ep. 54 with Jonathan Reinink and host Adam Wathan
for an interesting conversation about form handling.
Adam then went on and created
a gist of macros to add filtering functions to Laravel Requests.

Authors

I, Björn Nilsved, created this package while working at FEW.