Laravel - associative Array validation in a custom request

Question

I have a customer request as follows:

<textarea name="intro[en]"></textarea>
<textarea name="intro[fr]"></textarea>
<textarea name="intro[de]"></textarea>

I am validating it with a custom request:

class UpdateProfileRequest extends Request
{
    public function authorize()
    {
        return true;
    }

    public function rules()
    {
         return [
             'intro.*'           => 'required|max:100'
         ];
    }
}

The validator is not working. I think this is because the .* only works for numbered arrays, rather than associative arrays?

I'm not sure how to go about doing this.

Is there a way to do it with a custom request like this? If so what is the syntax?

Otherwise, what should I do. I already wrote some custom code inside the controller method like this:

    $hasIntro = false;
    $hasBio = false;

    foreach($request->get('intro') as $language => $localIntro)
    {
        if(!empty($request->get('intro')[$language]))
        {
            $hasIntro = true;
        }
    }

    if(!$hasIntro or !$hasBio)
    {
        return redirect()->back()->withErrors('You must enter at least 1 Bio and 1 Intro');
    }

Which I think might be one manual way of going about this. Though I believe withErrors requires a validator, so I'm back to the same problem... Though perhaps there is a way to do this manually?

My ideal solution is to find the associative array syntax, if that indeed exists?

Answer 1

I'm not sure about the right way but my idea is something like this

public function rules($inputs)
{
    $rules = [];
    foreach ($inputs as $key => $val) {
        if ( strpos($key, "intro") === 0 ){
            $rules[$key] = 'required|max:100';
        }
    }
    return $rules;
}