README

A package that provides a validation as a service for Laravel 5.

Goal

There is a lot of talk about where to perform the data validation: repositories? controllers? gateways? services? models? Each one has its point; good things and bad things... We personally found useful to extract this logic to a service that can be injected into other services on the same -or higher- layer.

So the goal of this package is to provide a simple validation service that can be injected into other services, and that although it uses the Laravel Validation class by default, it can be extended to use other validation libraries.

Installation

Install this package by adding it to your composer.json or by running composer require followloop/validation-service in your project's folder.
Ready to go! No service provider or anything else needed :).

Usage

You just need to create a Validation class that extends the main validation class (LaravelValidator) and implements their own methods to validate the data. It sounds weird, huh? Lets see an example...

Examples

I personally like to split my Laravel code from my app code, so inside the app folder I usually create a folder that includes ALL the business logic that is lowly coupled to the framework: app/MyWebApp. Inside that folder I like to split my files into different folders, based on the role of these: Models? Repositories? Helpers? Services? And so on...

Once again -and this is a matter of taste, that's all- I like to split my services into areas of responsibility: Users, Auth, Mailing, etc. And then, in that service folders, I like to include the validators. So the folder structure inside my projects looks pretty much like this most of the times:

+-- app
|   +-- MyApp
|       +-- Models
|       +-- Helpers
|       +-- Repositories
|       .
|       .
|       +-- Services
|           +-- Auth
|           +-- Mailing
|           +-- Users
|               +-- UsersServicesInterface.php
|               +-- UsersServiceProvider.php
|               .
|               .
|               +-- src
|               +-- Validation
|                   +-- UserValidatorInterface.php
|                   +-- src
|                       +-- LaravelUserValidator.php

Let's take a look at how I would implement the UserValidatorInterface and the LaravelUserValidator classes:

<?php

namespace MyApp\Services\Users\Validation;

interface UserValidatorInterface
{
    const EXISTS_BY_ID = 'existsById';
    const EXISTS_BY_EMAIL = 'existsByEmail';
    
    public function existsById();
    public function existsByEmail();
}

<?php

namespace MyApp\Services\Users\Validation\src;

use LOOP\ValidationService\src\LaravelValidator;

class LaravelUserValidator extends LaravelValidator implements UserValidatorInterface
{   

    public function existsById()
    {
        return [
            'id'    => 'required|exists:users,id'
        ]
    }
    
    public function existsByEmail()
    {
        return [
            'email'    => 'required|exists:users,email'
        ]
    }
}

The service provider for this group of services (UsersServiceProvider) should be responsible of providing me with the validator for the user, bind to the LaravelUserValidator, something like this:

public function register()
{
    // Register other services here...
    
    // Clients validation services
    $this->app->bind( 'MyApp\Services\Users\Validation\UserValidatorInterface', function ( $app )
    {
        return $app->make( 'MyApp\Services\Users\Validation\src\LaravelUserValidator' );
    });
}

After this and after adding our service provide to the config/app.php file, we can inject the Validation service in any part of our app. I like to use ONLY inside other services. Something like this...

<?php

namespace MyApp\Services\Users\src;

use MyApp\Services\Users\Validation\UserValidator;

class UsersService implements UsersServicesInterface 
{

    protected $usersValidator;

    public function __construct(
        UsersValidator $usersValidatorInterface
    )
    {
        $this->usersValidator = $usersValidatorInterface;
    }
   
    
    public function getUserById( $userId )
    {
        $data = [
            'id' => $userId
        ]
        
        if ( $this->usersValidator->with( $data )->passes( UserValidatorInterface::EXISTS_BY_ID ) )
        {
            // It passes the validation, so do whatever.. fetch user in $user and return it (for example).
            
            .
            .
            
            return $user;
        }
        
        // if we are at this point then the validation failed and this will return an array with the errors.
        return $this->usersValidator->errors();
    }
    
}

Changelog

v0.1.2:

Basic Laravel Validation service using the Laravel Validation class.

Credits

Jesús Espejo (Twitter)

Bugs & contributing

Found a bug? That's good and bad. Let me know using the Issues on Github.
Need a feature or have something interesting to contribute with? Great! Open a pull request.

followloop / validation-service

Maintainers

Details