Is it advisable to bind application data to request in Laravel 5

Question

Would it be advisable, if i am doing authentication in a middleware and adding some data to the \Illuminate\Http\Request $request object and using that data in the controller by injecting \Illuminate\Http\Request $request into the controller method?

The reason, the app needs to make a database call to find out if the credentials are valid and if it is, it returns something like a primary key that i use in subsequent db operations.

At the moment, everything is done in the controller. If i were to use a separate middleware for authentication, can i bind the data that my controller needs to the request object if the middleware check passes? if so, how should i go about doing it?

Inspiration - Expressjs way of binding and passing data along the request through a stack of middlewares / routes.

Answer 1

I dont understand - why dont you just use the Laravel authenticator?

You say:

The reason, the app needs to make a database call to find out if the credentials are valid and if it is, it returns something like a primary key that i use in subsequent db operations.

And that is exactly what the Laravel Authenticator does?

Then in your controller you can just do

`auth()->user()` // gives you the user record
`auth()->id()` // user_id from the DB
`auth()->user()->name` // gives you the `name` column off the record. You can change it to anything.

Edit: Meanwhile - you can still use the Laravel Authenticator package whilst using a legacy system for authentication. In your middleware you can do something like this:

if (doLegacyCheckHere()) {
      Auth::loginUsingId(1);
}

This means you can do your check via the neo4j graph db - and if it returns true that the user is authenticated correctly - then you just log them into the Laravel system yourself.

Answer 2

Yes, that is probably a good way to do it, as the build-in Laravel Authentication system works the same way: you can access a logged in user via $request::user(). See http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/authentication#retrieving-the-authenticated-user