Laravel: Update single field of table using a Resource Controller

Question

I have a Resource Controller (with all the actions: index, create, store, show, edit, update and destroy) and I was wondering what is the best approach to edit a single field column?

Let's say we have a Users table with name, email, password and active (active is a tiny int 0 or 1).

In the users management page, there is a button to activate/deactivate users (makes a request to the server to update the "active" field for the selected user).

Should I create a new method updateStatus in the Controller or is there a way to handle this using the update method?

I don't want, by mistake, allow empty values in the name, email or password when updating the "active" column, so I need to keep the validation rules (in short, all fields are required), but this means when updating the "active" field, I need to pass all the user data in the request.

At this point I'm very confused and all help will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

When you send an instance from edit action to the form , all the data will be sent and you can edit one or more columns if you need . For instance :

public function update(Request $request , $id) {
    $data = YourModel::find($id);
    $data->someColumn = $request->someColumn;
    $data->save();
}

other fields that you didn't send any value for them will be saved as they were before . for this you can set the form like below :

{!! Form::model($yourInstance,['route'=>['someRoute.update','id'=>$yourInstance->id],'method'=>'PATCH',]) !!}

Answer 2

It sounds like you are new to Laravel, and some key concepts can be hard to grasp.

In my opinion the best way to do it would be via a Model class. This is slightly confused by the fact that Laravel has a built in Users model, so I'm going to use a different model as the example of how to update a db field.

php artisan make:model MyData

Will create a new empty model file for the MyData table in app/

The file will look like this:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class MyData extends Model
{
    //
}

Even though there's nothing in there, it now allows you do alter the database table using Eloquent.

In your controller add this to make sure the model is included:

use App\MyData as MyData;

The controller should have a method something like this if updating with user input from a form:

public function updateStatus(MyData $myData, Request $request){

    $myData->where('id', $request->id)->update(['active' => $request->active]);
}

You could do the exact same thing like this:

public function updateStatus(Request $request){
  $data = MyData::find($request->id);
  $data->active = $request->active;
  $data->save();
}

Both approaches make sense in different circumstances.

See https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent#updates