👀 Views: 21 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11

laravel validation pivot-table PHP

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I am working with Laravel 9 and I'm working with an scenario with validating fields in a custom pivot table for a many-to-many relationship. I have two models, `Post` and `Tag`, where a post can have multiple tags and a tag can belong to multiple posts. I created a custom pivot model called `PostTag` to store additional fields like `is_primary` and `added_at`. When I try to save the pivot data with additional fields, I'm working with a validation scenario. Here’s my relationship definition in the `Post` model: ```php public function tags() { return $this->belongsToMany(Tag::class) ->using(PostTag::class) ->withPivot('is_primary', 'added_at'); } ``` In my controller, I'm attempting to validate the incoming request data like this: ```php $request->validate([ 'tags.*.id' => 'required|exists:tags,id', 'tags.*.is_primary' => 'required|boolean', 'tags.*.added_at' => 'nullable|date', ]); ``` However, when I submit the request, I receive the following behavior message: ``` The is_primary field is required when tags.*.id is present. ``` It seems that Laravel is not correctly recognizing the `is_primary` field as part of the pivot attributes. I've tried restructuring the validation rules and also wrapping the tags data in an array, but nothing seems to work. Here’s an example of the data I’m sending: ```json { "tags": [ { "id": 1, "is_primary": true, "added_at": "2023-10-01" }, { "id": 2, "is_primary": false } ] } ``` I also tried using `FormRequest` for the validation, but I still encounter the same scenario. Is there a specific way to handle validation for custom pivot attributes in Laravel that I might be missing? I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 using the latest version of Php. Any ideas what could be causing this?