Laravel 4自定义验证规则

Question

I am little confused as to whether a custom validation rules needs to return true or false to fire.

I am validating an email address to make that it does already belong to another model via a relationship.

Validator::extend('email_exists', function($attribute, $value, $parameter){
        $user = User::where('email', '=', $value)->with('clients')->first();
        //Does the user exits, and are they already a member of this client?
        //We know this by looking at the client id, and comparing them the current ID.
        if($user != NULL) {
            if(in_array(Input::get('client_id'), $user->clients->lists('id'))) {
                return false;
            } else {
                return true;
            }
        } else {
            return true;
        }

});

What I am trying to above is, find if a user exists with the entered email, if it does exist, then check if the email is related to any clients, and if any of those clients id match the client id in the POST, if the email exists and is related to client id in the POST I want to return an error, other wise I happy for the POST to processed.

At the moment, I think I am allowing anything through. Am I using the custom rule correctly, and what should return if I want to throw an error?

Answer 1

I think you're approaching this the wrong way. Instead of the stress of extending the Validator class for a singular use case, you should consider simply adding a message to the message bag with your input element as the key. eg

$validator->messages()->add('client_id', 'This email is already associated with a client');

Tip: I usually add a rules array to my models and inject a Validator class so I can easily validate the model without having to create an instance of the Validator or writing a rules array all the time.