This repo exists to demonstrate how to and why you should use Laravel's Form Request classes.
Add 127.0.0.1 form-requests.test to your hosts file.
Rename the .env.example file found in the root directory to .env.
docker-compose up to bring up docker.
docker exec -it form-requests_php_1 bash to ssh into the php container.
php artisan migrate to run our migrations.
You can view the app at http://form-requests.test:7575/
To create a form request class you can run php artisan make:request StoreBusinessFormRequest.
This would create a new form request class in app\Http\Requests called StoreBusinessFormRequest.php.
You then just need to import this into your controller and use DI to inject it into your method as per the commented out example in the code.
Using a form request class means we have a reusable piece of code.
In this business example if we created an edit method, and didn't use a form request class, we'd need to copy and paste all of our inline validation code to validate the exact same fields as in our store method.
If we needed to change a rule in the future now we'd need to update this rule in multiple places.
Another example would be, we've already got a web app and now we're creating an API for a mobile app. We wouldn't want to duplicate the web app validation for the mobile API and by using form request classes we could avoid doing this by reusing the same class.
Using form request classes also makes your code more readable as you greatly reduce the amount of code in your controller.
Using form request classes make your code more testable as you can create tests unit tests to test the class specifically rather than testing your inline validation indirectly by hitting an endpoint in a feature test.