php - Laravel 4 validation email unique constraint

Question

I'm writing a Laravel 4 app that has a users table with the usual contact info. In my users model, my validation for the email specifies 'email'=>'required|email|unique:users', which works fine when registering new users.

My question is how to handle the user edit form-- when the form is submitted, I'd like for the unique email constraint to only be fired if it's not the same as the old email-- otherwise you can't save your profile, since the email (your email) is already inuse.

Thanks

Answer 1

The third parameter to the unique rule allows you to specify an id of a record to ignore. When you're editing a user, you want your unique validation rule to ignore the value contained by the id of the user you are editing.

'email'=>'required|email|unique:users,email,'.$userId

You can see the docs on the validation rule here.

The trickiest part you'll run into is figuring out how to edit your rule to provide the id of the user you're editing. That all depends on how you have your rules set up and where you're doing your validation.