Laravel Code Tips

Laravel tip. From Laravel 8.69, there's a "Str::mask()" method which masks a portion of the string with a repeated character like "*".

⚡️ Database Tip

Unique indexes can not be created in some cases because a value is duplicated by e.g. soft-deleted rows.

But with partial indexes and creative tricks you can exclude some rows to create the uniqueness constraint on a selection of rows.

https://sqlfordevs.com/unique-index-ignore-some-rows

🐘 Can you believe I didn’t know that PHP has a backtick operator?

Anything between `` will be executed like shell_exec and returned 🤯

Docs: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.execution.php

🙂🙃🙂 Have you ever tried running your tests in random order?

This can be helpful to detect interdependencies between tests.

(works on @pestphp and PHPUnit)

Eloquent’s setRelation is a very powerful method when used well. Here’s how I used it to solve a performance problem in @OhDearApp

https://freek.dev/2311-increase-performance-by-using-eloquents-setrelation-method

#laravel #php #performance

⚡️ Database Tip

Everyone knows the LIMIT clause. But what do you do if you want to have e.g. the employees with the TOP 3 salaries and not exclude the 4th or 5th one earning the same as the 3rd? The WITH TIES clause can return more results if the value is the same. Great!

🔐🧵 I added a small, but pretty nice, security enhancement in Laravel v9.20.0

When denying actions via Gates & Policies in Laravel, you can now customise the HTTP response status that is returned

This allows you to deny access, while hiding the existence of your resources.

TIL:

In Laravel Livewire, it's better sometimes to use wire.entangle(), instead of the entangle directive, avoids weird issues like "invalid or unexpected token."

Thanks, @samuelstancl, for posting that gem. 🔥

🔮 Travel in time in your Laravel tests.

Using the travel() method you can travel back and forward in time.

No more Carbon::setTestNow()

Super useful 👏

Ever needed to add HTML inside a Laravel translation string, and had to split the string up into chunks?

Or felt bad about raw HTML in your translations?

Here's a little cheat - parse markdown. Most of the formatting you want to do inside a translation string is available. 🤷‍♂️

⚡️ Database Tip

Extending a traditional database schema with NoSQL-like JSON columns can make the schema more understandable. But you should also ensure these JSON documents conform to an expected schema!

https://sqlfordevs.com/json-schema-validation

🔥 #Laravel Tip:

The default encryption cast for Eloquent models uses the app key, making rotation difficult and allowing anyone with key to decrypt all the DB. To address this, consider creating a custom cast that uses the model to create its own unique key.

Yay! In Laravel 9.18 you can finally eager load ("with") using a nested array.

Printing a word in singular or plural form depending on the number of items is usually a pain.

With Laravel Str / Stringable however, it's a breeze 🍃 😍

Enjoying the little things: the new fake() helper we introduced to Laravel.

Because it is a singleton, you can get unique values across multiple calls / boundaries.

Super useful for tests, factories, seeders, and for quickly prototyping a design with fake data ✌️

💡 Create single-use traits to split up long classes into smaller parts

This way, all e.g. link-related logic can be contained within a single trait

⚡️ Database Tip

Many applications use the table's numeric primary key in the URL: Bots can scrape all data by incrementing the ID and competitors know your number of customers/resources and growth.Adding a random UUID which is used in URLs solves this.

https://sqlfordevs.com/uuid-prevent-enumeration-attack

🔥 You can import entire namespaces in PHP

This is useful when you're interacting with many classes from a single namespace

💡🟰 Quick #Laravel Eloquent tip for comparing database columns to each other within a query.

You don't have to use any raw statements to do this - whereColumn() has got you covered! 😊

🔥 Did you know that Laravel has a handy Blade directive to only render stuff in a given environment?

Here is @laravelphp tip that makes your code more expressive. 💅

"Return to route profile". ✨

⚡️ Database Tip

Sometimes you want to get e.g. the last three orders for every customer. Normal joins can't do that. You have to execute n+1 queries in code, which is slow!

But with lateral joins, you can do one for-each loop join in SQL 🤯 https://sqlfordevs.com/for-each-loop-lateral-join

TIL that you can use your own blade file for the maintenance mode screen in #Laravel by using the render option

If your app has only a few models, consider creating helper functions for model factories

Helpers have perfect IDE support and can make your tests a lot cleaner

Pairs especially well with @pestphp 💅

⚡️ Database Tip

Sometimes you want to make columns unique but you can't because e.g. there are still soft-deleted rows in the table witht the same value. By only including relevant rows (partial index) you can still enforce uniqueness, and you can even simulate it for MySQL!

⚡️ Database Tip

Extending a traditional database schema with NoSQL-like JSON columns can make the schema more understandable. But you should also ensure these JSON documents conform to an expected schema!

https://sqlfordevs.com/json-schema-validation

This is old, but still a great feature. Eloquent is so smooth! Check if a record exists in Laravel with exists() and doesNotExists()

🔥 Laravel Tip: Default Models.

In your relationships, you can define default models.

That way if the relationship doesn't exist it will return a default model so you don't have to check if is null every time.

Laravel tip💡You can add a Temporary URL for the local storage driver #laravel

#Laravel Tip ⚡ Instead of using the controller in each route, consider using a route controller group.

#Laravel Tip 🔥 Few convenient methods to work with the output of scheduled tasks.

#Laravel #PHP Tip 🔥 You can use #faker to not only generate text values but also fake images.

💡 Just a quick tip: define every argument of commands as optional and ask for input if they are missing.

This way, you don’t need to think about the arguments when running a command.

Just run it, and it will ask everything:

Wait... what?! 🤯

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/03/html-attributes-you-never-use/#the-form-attribute-for-form-fields

📝 #Laravel Tip | In some cases you don't want the updated_at field the change when updating small things. .. Did you know you could disable the timestamps while saving your data? Here is how... 🔥

#laraveltip #php #code #development #details

🔥 Laravel tip: Customizing Missing Model Behavior in route model bindings

By default, Laravel throws a 404 error when it can't bind the model, but you can change that behavior by passing a closure to the missing method.

🔥 Laravel Tip: Route model binding soft-deleted models

By default, when using route model binding will not retrieve models that have been soft-deleted. You can change that behavior by using withTrashed in your route.

🚀 You can now use the new "assertNothingSentTo" method in your Laravel tests.

You can use this to ensure that no notifications were sent to a given notifiable model (or models)!

#laravel #php

Did you know that translation variables can easily be capitalized or converterd to lowercase and uppcase in Laravel? 🆙🌍

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Eager loading a model’s relationships is a great way to improve performance / avoid the N+1 problem. However, you can go further… with constrained eager loading you can tell Laravel to only load the related records you actually need.

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Ever wondered what the differences are between an Eloquent model’s ‘fresh()’ and ‘refresh()’ methods? Let’s see what each of them do with this little cheatsheet.

#PestPHP #PHP Tip

If you have a mixed codebase with Pest and PHPUnit tests you can use almost all of the pest magic in your PHPUnit tests. It just works.

Pest tip: Use the dd method to dump the current expectation value and end the test suite. 🔦

Just found out there's a single artisan command to clear out all Laravel caches, much less typing!

🔥 When you're testing your @LaravelLivewire components, one of the simplest tests you can add is a "can this component be mounted" test. This is one of the best ways to test your the mounting process in isolation and ensuring the component renders the view correctly.

It's a minor thing but the PHP isset function can accept multiple vars. https://www.instagram.com/p/CbctwMxgPv4/

#Laravel Tip: Since todays Laravel 9.5 release you can now do partially queue faking.

🔥 Want to have some autocompletion in Blade?

You can just add a doc block 👍

#laravel #php

One of my favorite things about using S3 in PHP is that you can register a stream wrapper to interact with files.

You can use the native PHP functions like fopen, fread, etc.

Very helpful when you have massive files you don't want to load into memory!

(CSVs are a use case.)

⚡️ Database Tip

Your application will have bugs and any data stored may be corrupt forever. But with constraints on the data model, rules would have prevented saving incorrect data in the first place! Use them as a last frontier to make sure you always have valid data.

Calling pluck directly on a model is the most performant way to retrieve a single column from all models in Laravel. Calling get/all before pluck will read all models into memory before plucking the value.

#Laravel Tip 🔥 : In some situation you might want to update all the models inside the eloquent collection. You can do that easily in Laravel using toQuery() method. Laravel is utilizing #PHP like a pro. See how can you do that 👇

#webdevelopers #100DaysOfCode #developers

⚡️ Database Tip

Creating indexes is a handcraft learned from experience, multiple-column indexes is a lot more complicated. But it doesn't have to be complicated!

Here are 3 simple rules for the column ordering of multiple column indexes, solving 80% of the perf problems.

💡If you have a many-to-many relationship with a pivot table and extra columns, you can use the updateExistingPivot to update the extra column's value.

In this example, I need to update the status of a given subscriber:

Over the past few years, I've worked on some large apps that deal with events in different timezones. This can end up being quite confusing, as best practice is always to store dates in UTC.

That's where Carbon's shiftTimezone() and setTimezone() methods can help you out! ⬇️

Encapsulating complex conditionals offering a "callable" API is sexy AF. 🍑

🌶️ #Laravel tip: Sometimes you may need to send a notification to someone who is not stored as a "user" of your application.

Welcome to On-Demand Notifications in Laravel 🔥

#PHP #Developers

Laravel tip: Use the "{action}_at" naming convention for your DATETIME and TIMESTAMP fields.

This helps you to instantly recognise in your code when you're using a datetime field 😄

#laravel #php

Did you know that you can create a "Subscriber" class in Laravel to handle multiple events with different methods in one Listener class?

This is very useful if you want to group certain actions with the same dependencies.

Documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/events#event-subscribers

I'm reading the Laravel 9 docs from scratch and TIL you can write your route restrictions in a more expressive way:

My Laravel tip of the day. If you're running slow tests that need to hit a third party API, you can break them out of your Features directory and put them in a dedicated test suite (e.g. External). Then you can run "phpunit --testsuite Feature", and your External tests won't run.

A quick one that I always forget about -- Faker::numerify, allowing you to generate numeric data in a specific pattern 👌👏

🔥 In Laravel 9, you'll be able to use the cool new "checked" Blade directive.

This is going to be a nice addition that we can use to clean up our Blade views a little bit

#laravel #php

💡 As of @laravelphp v8.36.0, you can skip 'TransformRequests' middlewares by registering a callback.

For example, you can use it on 'TrimStrings' and 'ConvertEmptyStringsToNull'.

#Laravel #PHP #webdev

🔥 Cool tidbit I learned during @LukeDowning19 ’s talk.

You can add a $bindings array to a service provider to bind things.

https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/providers#the-bindings-and-singletons-properties #laravel #php

🔥 #Laravel paginator tip: you can use getCollection and setCollection if you need to do something to the paginator underlying data. Trust me you'll know when you need this.

Fluent is a utility class provided by @laravelphp that lets us handle data fluently.

Out of the box it can be turned into an array or JSON, it can act as an array and it's serializable as a JSON.

It also gets and sets attributes dynamically and in a fluent way.

#Laravel #PHP

This is one of those macros I carry around from project to project.

Super clear, super easy, nice little life improvement.

Match offers such a compact and clean syntax compared to its PHP alternatives 🌈

It can make our code way more readable and concise 💅

#PHP

Pretty cool string helper method https://laravel-news.com/laravel-8-82-0 #laravel #php

Sometimes I forget about higher order collection messages in Laravel, but they're a great way to shorten and tidy up your code ✨

Here's a simplified (and not recommended) example.

✨Did you know Tailwind CSS has a shorthand syntax for background, border, and text opacity?

🔗 https://tailwindcss.com/docs/background-color#changing-the-opacity

🔥 Eloquent scopes pair very well with complex relation queries

Scopes should also have @method annotations. They make the model more self-documenting & better supported in IDEs

Since @laravelphp 8.79 it is possible to resolve variadic dependencies out of the IoC container.

This is quite useful for type-hinting and static analysis and allows us to bind a set of concrete implementations to an abstraction layer.

#Laravel #PHP

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Need to make more than one HTTP request e.g. to one or more sites? You might think about running them concurrently to improve performance. The HTTP client's 'pool' method makes this a trivial exercise.

Just got schooled in a Laravel feature I was unaware of:

Tell Laravel to always send to a specific address!

🌶️ #Laravel tip: You can select the columns to run when using the Model::all() method. No need for an additional select() method.

A tiny tip to always keep in mind 💡

#PHP #Developers

Array destructuring is probably one of my favorite things in modern PHP and I don't think I use it enough

🔥 Epic Laravel Tip - Did you know that you don't necessarily have to use underscores for migrations names?

If you're creating custom exceptions inside your Laravel application, you can add a "context()" method to provide additional data to be printed in the log, as well as a "render()" method to allow the exception to display its own view to the user. Super cool! 🤩

Make use of the built-in "includeWhen" and "includeUnless" directives to get rid of those ugly if conditions.

Just learned about the Eloquent "value()" method from @amaelftah 💪. Eloquent make things so easy. Seems like there's shortcuts hiding everywhere, I love it! 💅🤩

🔥 Custom collections pair very well with higher order proxies

When you have some repetitive low level logic that you'd like to abstract into more readable methods that follow your business terminology, custom collections can be a great choice

🔥 In #mysql you can compare strings by how they sound rather than how they have been typed using SOUNDEX() function

#laravelframework #laravel #mysql #sql

🔥 Did you know that you can supply default values for route parameters in @laravelphp?

In the screenshot below, we use the current user's account as the default value for {account}. This means we don't have to provide it when generating the users.index route.

⚡ ️Database Tip

Some applications want to periodically deleted old historic data (or have to because of regulations). Deleting billions of rows is a very slow task which could take several minutes and may take your application down. Use partitions for efficient deleting!

😲 TIL: You can hide an image when it is broken so you don't get that ugly broken image icon from the browser.

🌶️ #Laravel #pestphp tip

If you like to plan your tests ahead of time and implement them one by one, you can always make use of a handy method skip() to tell the test runner to ignore those empty tests.

skip() accepts a callback too!

🔥 You can use first class callables for routes in PHP 8.1

The caveat is that the methods need to be static because there's no syntax for referencing instance methods on classes

I don't use constructor DI in my apps, so static methods are fine despite feeling a bit non-standard

#WeirdDevReadsDocs

Did you know?

You can add a --refresh flag to the artisan down command to send a refresh header to the browser. I think that's helpful for well visited apps where you trying to keep perceived downtime as low as possible!

https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/configuration#maintenance-mode

@laravelphp

Remembered this great tip recently, and it's nice to see how fast PHP evolves

The exact same behavior can be implemented using match () with a default value, which also removes the need for the second callback ⚡️ https://twitter.com/reinink/status/1233017064492761088

🔥 You can use array spreading to pass an array as arguments to another function. #php

Here’s a self-contained example where we spread the array output of sys_getloadavg. That function returns an array with three elements.

https://github.com/spatie/cpu-load-health-check/blob/70f387d5167c24d4000d825a5bddab2504d557fb/src/CpuLoad.php#L17

#php

❌ To customise a validation message for a request in @laravelphp , you can add a message function to a form request. Very handy! #laravel #php

Does your @laravelphp application have 0 tests? Here is one test you can easily add to get started. It's probably the most important test — in web projects — and it has an enormous value.

✓ Ensures your application boots. ✅ ✓ Ensures the home page can be loaded. 💨

This pattern is brilliant and can make your code much more clean and consistent

The tweet is from last year, but it's still very relevant

https://twitter.com/LiamHammett/status/1260252814158282752

🔥 Simple typehints and annotations go a long way

Even without any docblocks, this code is perfectly understandable by both developers and IDEs

Writing code like this: 👉 Prevents bugs using type safety 👉 Makes the code self-documenting 👉 Takes only a few seconds to implement

🔥 In an Eloquent model can define a relation that will get the newest (or oldest) item of another relation. Very nice!

📘 Docs: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/eloquent-relationships#has-one-of-many

#laravel #php

🔥When you add an array{} return docblock, IDEs are able to autocomplete the keys when reaching into that array.

Sweet! #php

A quick reminder about a not-so-often used #PHP feature.

We have the spread operator, and it works just like the one in JavaScript.

If you want to have Eloquent return a custom collection class (so you can define methods of your own on it, you can the newCollection method on your model.

More in this excellent post by @timacdonald87 https://timacdonald.me/giving-collections-a-voice/

#laravel #php

🔥 Tip: You don't have to use "related_id"-type columns in database queries or value comparisons.

Laravel understands your relations and lets you write much cleaner code.

💡#Laravel Tip: Did you know that any commands you schedule in the console kernel can automatically email their output if something goes wrong.

Not sure on the difference between "strtoupper" and "mb_strtoupper"? #PHP

A tiny tip about #laravel eloquent.

To retrieve the Query Builder after filtering the results: you can use ->toQuery().

The method internally use the first model of the collection and a whereKey comparison on the Collection models.

To boost perceived speed in your @LaravelLivewire apps when loading data, make use of prefetching.

The .prefetch modifier tells Livewire to fetch the result in the background on hover, and then displays the result when the button is actually clicked ✨

Laravel Tip: You can customize how your exceptions are rendered by adding a 'render' method to your exception.

For example, this allows you to return JSON instead of a Blade view when the request expects JSON.

I don't do it very often, but you can use Laravel's Schema builder anywhere you want, not just in migrations!

If you ever need to make a temp table to help you mass process data more quickly, it's a great solution.

A handy $loop object is available in Laravel Blade foreach loops. Super useful for controlling output based on the loop position ➰

Source dive for reference: https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/8.x/src/Illuminate/View/Concerns/ManagesLoops.php

🔥 I sometimes forget you can use form="form-name" on input types to hook fields inside one form to another. This makes it as if those fields were inside that <form>-tag.

This is super useful if the fields are rendered in the wrong form, but UI wise it makes sense.

Using the 'something_at' convention instead of just a boolean in Laravel models gives you visibility into when a flag was changed – like when a product went live.

#Laravel Updates:

In Laravel 8.7 you can now validate enum columns!

An Example:

⚡️ Database Tip

Sometimes you have very complex queries involving multiple calculation steps. Instead of nesting queries or doing it in application code you can use Common Table Expressions (CTE) to refine your data in every step and even reuse former steps.

This release of Laravel also includes a "--requests" flag when making models via Artisan. This option will create a "Store{Model}Request" and "Update{Model}Request" form request + update the controller to use those requests on their respective methods. 🔥

Thanks @PovilasKorop!

💡 Check if there's a previous URL when showing error pages instead of linking to static page!

It's incredibly useful if your marketing and app pages share the same error pages! It makes sure your users won't get lost :)

Happy Monday 🙌 Let's start the week with a Laravel tip: You can use the Prunable trait to automatically remove models from your database. For example, you can permanently remove soft deleted models after a few days.

#Laravel Livewire Tip: If you want to remove property values at once and make your code cleaner, you can use $this->reset method.

Here is an example:

When using Laravel morphs, you can eek out some extra performance by using small integers instead of strings for your morph types.

Smaller, faster indexes for the database to manage!

Especially useful for tables like comments or audits, which can be many millions of rows.

If you ever need to generate text-based tables for sending in text messages, outputting in console, or in logs, @symfony provides an awesome "Table" class, just for that! 💅 Such a cool utility! 🤩

Did you know that you don't have to pass a function to Laravel's "where" method when using the Rule class?

Laravel Tip: Abstract relations you commonly use to a trait. It’s a DRY approach that keeps your models thin.

PHP reminder: you can define your class properties directly on the constructor. ✅

PHP reminder: you can use the method "__toString()" to specify the string representation of an object. ✅

🔥 A way to check if a string contains valid JSON: just decode it, encode it again, and check if it matches the original value #php

Testing Tip: use a test class or spec file as a place to gather all of your thoughts about how a particular feature should behave. Then, write each as a pending test.

Here's an example from our upcoming "Feed" section.

💡 By default, the @laravelphp HTTP client doesn't throw exceptions on client and server errors.

However, you can make it do that by using the 'throw' method, and this method is chainable 🔥

Documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/http-client#throwing-exceptions

#Laravel #PHP #webdev #webdevelopment

For example:

• invoice() to create an Invoice model
• product() to create a Product model

Imagine that you have a nested component that depends on the parent state. You don't need to sync child state into parent, you just want to replace the child when the parent state changes.

You can use my custom directive for that.

It's good to get into the habit of using $wire, since it provides a full communication layer for your Livewire component.

It also doesn't run into issues when you use it inside single quoted attributes.

Let's look at the same trait again. It does two interesting things.

1. Livewire::listen() is superior to hydrate* and dehydrate* when you need access to specific parts of the lifecycle

2. The instanceof self check scopes the listener to the component

Traits are a powerful way to reuse functionality between Livewire components.

They're generally better than component nesting, since that comes with more complexity and worse performance.

Next up: Advanced trait examples

As you know, Livewire sometimes runs into painful DOM diffing issues. They can usually be solved with simple workarounds, but sometimes those workarounds get quite complex.

So I built a package that adds a wire:replace directive, telling Livewire to replace an entire chunk of the DOM, instead of trying to diff individual changes.

This example is from Tenancy v2 when we had an ActiveRecord-style custom Tenant object.

Very useful if you want to tag jobs with things like the user/tenant id.

You DON'T have to go raw SQL when you hit a performance issue with Eloquent. There's so many "secret" techniques.

Example: You can create scopes to add specific selects to your queries.

I didn't know about this for so long.

Instead of: $table->unsignedBigInteger('user_id'); $table->foreign('user_id')->references('id')->on('users');

You do: $table->foreignId('user_id')->constrained();

Example: Default value set on creation.

$model->getOriginal()

in Eloquent event listeners can be very useful.

One such use case is checking whether an order is locked. If it is, the only write action we permit is unlocking it. Only then can changes be made.

Not recommended in most cases, but interesting.

(image stolen from the internet)

One of them is examining sent emails ✉️

You usually don't need a service like Mailtrap. Just use the log mail driver and install Telescope.

(image stolen from the internet)

It's IMO better to use static properties and have "self-contained" behavior & configuration. Than to have a billion config keys. Especially when building large packages.

Makes the package more extensible, by consisting of atomic parts

Extremely handy when you have multiple admin panels in a single app.

Great for debugging/tweaking the design.

You can tell the app what response to return when a specific exception is encountered.

This is the simplest example. There's many more use cases.

Left: double nesting Right: arrow function

Above I said that moving business logic to action/service classes is good. But context matters

Here's code design advice from a popular "Laravel best practices" repo. There's absolutely no reason to put a 3-line check into a class. That's just overengineered

Many people will disagree with this, because they do it. But it makes no sense.

There's no point in using docblocks when they don't give any extra information. If the typehint is enough, don't add a docblock.

That's just noise.

You can make your Blade templates more expressive by creating custom directives. For example, rather than checking if the user has the admin role, you could use @admin.

Sometimes you may want to execute DB queries in blade. There are some ok use cases for this, such as in layout files.

But if it's a view returned by a controller, pass the data in the view data instead.

PHP has many great operators that can replace ugly if checks. Memorize them.

If you have a complex route action, consider moving it to a separate controller.

For OrderController::create, you'd create CreateOrderController.

Another solution is to move that logic to an action class — do what works best in your case.

You can store things like "results per page" in config files. Don't add them to the app config file though. Create your own. In my e-commerce project, I use config/shop.php.

Rather than writing complex where() clauses, create query scopes with expressive names.

This will make your e.g. controllers have to know less about the database structure and your code will be cleaner.

Similar to single-use traits.

This tactic is great when you have a very long template and you want to make it more manageable.

There's nothing wrong with @including headers and footers in layouts, or things like complex forms in page views.

Rather than thinking "what can this object do", think about "what can be done with this object". Exceptions apply, such as with action classes, but this is a good rule of thumb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfgtKb-VpRk

Don't think that long variable/method names are wrong. They're not. They're expressive.

Better to call a longer method than a short one and check the docblock to understand what it does

Same with variables. Don't use nonsense 3-letters abbreviations

Rather than passing a huge amount of arguments in a specific order, consider creating an object with properties to store this data.

Bonus points if you can find that some behavior can be moved into to this object.

Know the difference between static/instance methods & variables and private/protected/public visibility. Also learn how Laravel uses magic methods.

You don't need this as a beginner, but as your code grows, it's crucial.

Sometimes people put helpers into a class.

Beware, it can get messy. This is a class with only static methods used as helper functions. It's usually better to put these methods into classes with related logic or just keep them as global functions.

They're a great place to hide complex validation logic.

But beware of exactly that — hiding things. When your validation logic is simple, there's nothing wrong with doing it in the controller. Moving it to a form request makes it less explicit

Your controllers should be simple. They should say things like "create invoice for order". They shouldn't be concerned with the details of how your database is structured.

Leave that to the model.

Opening an array with [ and indenting the values tends to work well. Same with long function parameter values.

Other good places to split lines are chained calls and closures.

Too much nesting & else statements tend to make code harder to read.

Custom collections got you sorted. Love these methods.