Laravel 5 - validate array as required, but allow an empty array to be passed

Question

I'm validating a request in Laravel 5.4 with the validator, see the documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/validation#validating-arrays

Basically, it's this code in the Controller:

public function createSomeResource(Request $request) {     $this->validate($request, [         'items' => 'required',     ];     ... } 

I would like to require the presence of the field "items" and this code does it, but the problem is that the validation fails when the "items" field is an empty array, i.e.

{     "fields": [] } 

, which is an undesired behavior. I know that's the documented behavior of the "required" parameter but I don't see any "clean" workaround. I tried also:

public function createSomeResource(Request $request) {     $this->validate($request, [         'items' => 'required_unless:items,[]',     ];     ... } 

but it fails as well, probably because the documentation says that it works with a different field after the "required_unless" clause, but I'm not totally sure about it.

Could you suggest me a way to require the presence of the field "items" without forbidding the empty array?

EDIT: another "obvious" approach that has come to my mind is to use the "present|array" rule and it almost does what I want, but unfortunately, an empty string passes that validation rule as well, which is maybe a bug in Laravel, maybe not - I opened an issue for it on the Laravel github repository: https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/18948

Answer 1

Try this:

public function createSomeResource(Request $request) {     $this->validate($request, [         'items' => 'present|array',     ];     ... }