Why is my create form request throwing off a 404 exception in Laravel5?

Question

So I am working with a Laravel 5 installation and like a good programmer I am trying to get the validation logic out of my controller using the new Form Requests feature in Laravel.

So I went ahead and created a form request called CreateTenantRequest like so:

php artisan make:request CreateTenantRequest

By default it returns a false in the authorize method and it works correctly. If I fire a request, it says forbidden. But then I updated the rules and I set the authorize method to true and now when I fire the same request from Postman, it says:

NotFoundHttpException in RouteCollection.php line 161:

Which is ridiculous because when I change it to false, it returns forbidden fine?

What am I missing or doing wrong?

And although this wouldn't matter I guess but my rules array is as follows:

return [
    // Tenant details
    'name' => 'required|max:255',
    'username' => 'required|max:255|unique:tenant',
    // Tenant Admin details
    'first_name' => 'required',
    'last_name' => 'required',
    'email' => 'required|email|max:255',
    'password' => 'required|confirmed|min:6',
];

Routes file:

<?php

Route::group(['prefix' => 'api'], function(){
    Route::post('authenticate', 'Auth\AuthController@authenticate');

    // SuperAdmin Group
    Route::group(['namespace' => 'Archive', 'middleware' => 'superadmin'], function(){
        Route::resource('tenants', 'TenantController');
        Route::get('tenants/{id}/users', 'TenantController@showUsersForTenant');
    });

    // Tenant Group
    Route::group(['namespace' => 'Tenant'], function(){
        Route::resource('roles', 'RoleController');
        Route::resource('users', 'UserController');
    });

    // Remove before production
    // Only for testing purposes
    Route::get('test', function(){
        // return JWTAuth::parseToken()->getPayload()->get('username');
    });
});

Answer 1

So after a bid discussion with shock_gone_wild, I realized that the request was not ajax and hence laravel was rerouting to the a url with the errors in session.

I was testing the API with Postman REST client and by default it sends basic HTTP requests but when a header is added like so:

X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest

It makes the request Ajax and then laravel checks to see if it is indeed ajax, so instead of routing to a url, it gave back the validation errors in JSON.

So anytime if anyone is creating a decoupled web service and trying to test it using Postman, do it with the header so that you can simulate actual ajax requests at your application.