README

Abstraction for Laravel is designed to in-source all of your model validation to the model itself.

Features

Abstraction does one thing: validate your models for you! Simply define the $rules variable on your model, and extend the Abstraction model, and you're good to go!

Requirements

Abstraction is built for Laravel, specifically 4.0.*.

Installation

To install Abstraction, simply add "adamgoose/abstraction": "dev-master" to your composer.json, and execute composer update.

Usage

To utilize Abstraction on a model, extend Adamgoose\Abstraction\Model instead of Eloquent, like so:

<?php

use Adamgoose\Abstraction\Model;

class Item extends Model {

}

Once you're extending Abstraction, you can simply add your validtion rules to the model, like so:

  public static $rules = [
    // validation rules
    'name' => 'required',
  ];

You can also customize the validation messages:

  public static $messages = [
    // validation messages
    'name' => 'The Name field is required.'
  ];

When you're ready to save a model, you can do it in two ways:

The Traditional Way

$item = Item::find($id);
$input = Input::all();

$validation = $item->fill($input)->save() ?: $item->errors;

The Abstraction Way

$item = Item::find($id);
$input = Input::all();

$validation = $item->fillAndSave($input) ?: $item->errors;

Yes, the fillAndSave(array $attributes) method simply executes fill(array $attributes) and returns save().

Contributing

This package is a minimal package to streamline the validation process, potentially eliminating the need for Validation and/or Creation services. That being said, contributions to this package will be considered accordingly. Please feel free to submit issues and/or pull-requests if you think there is something that Abstraction could do better.