Laravel 4 Form Validation should be unique on update form, but not if current

Question

I am trying to validate an update user profile form, whereby the validation should check that the email doesn\'t exist already, but disregard if the users existing email remains

Answer 1

You can accomplish this with the sometimes function of the validator

Something like:

$validator->sometimes('email', 'unique:users,email', function ($input) {
    return $input->email == Input::get('email');
});

See http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/validation#conditionally-adding-rules for more info

Answer 2

Your rule is written correctly in order to ignore a specific id, however, you'll need to update the value of {{{ $id }}} in your unique rule before attempting the validation.

I'm not necessarily a big fan of this method, but assuming your rules are a static attribute on the User object, you can create a static method that will hydrate and return the rules with the correct values.

class User extends Eloquent {
    public static $rules = array(
        'email' => 'unique:users,email,%1$s'
    );
    public static function getRules($id = 'NULL') {
        $rules = self::$rules;
        $rules['email'] = sprintf($rules['email'], $id);
        return $rules;
    }
}