Laravel - Form Input - Multiple select for a one to many relationship

Question

One of the requirements in an application that I am building is for a form input which takes in a varying number of items for a single field. For instance, sports that I play ar

Answer 1

Laravel 4.2

@SamMonk gave the best alternative, I followed his example and build the final piece of code

    @foreach($places as $place)
        places as $p) @if($place->id == $p->id)selected="selected"@endif @endforeach>{{$place->name}}
    @endforeach

In my project I'm going to have many table relationships like this so I wrote an extension to keep it clean. To load it, put it in some configuration file like "app/start/global.php". I've created a file "macros.php" under "app/" directory and included it in the EOF of global.php

// app/start/global.php
require app_path().'/macros.php';

// macros.php
Form::macro("chosen", function($name, $defaults = array(), $selected = array(), $options = array()){

    // For empty Input::old($name) session, $selected is an empty string
    if(!$selected) $selected = array();

    $opts = array(
        'class' => 'chosen-select',
        'id' => $name,
        'name' => $name . '[]',
        'multiple' => true
    );
    $options = array_merge($opts, $options);
    $attributes = HTML::attributes($options);

    // need an empty array to send if all values are unselected
    $ret = '';
    $ret .= '';
    foreach($defaults as $def) {
        $ret .= 'id ? $p->id: $p;
            if($def->id == $current) {
                $ret .= ' selected="selected"';
            }
        }
        $ret .= '>' . HTML::entities($def->name) . '';
    }
    $ret .= '';
    return $ret;
});

Usage

List without pre-selected items (create view)

{{ Form::chosen('places', $places, Input::old('places')) }}

Preselections (edit view)

{{ Form::chosen('places', $places, $job->places) }}

Complete usage

{{ Form::chosen('places', $places, $job->places, ['multiple': false, 'title': 'I\'m a selectbox', 'class': 'bootstrap_is_mainstream']) }}