Simple use-case: you want to filter only those categories which have at least one product. Or course, you write Category::with('products')->... but how do you filter out those empty categories? Those with no product? There's an app function for that: has().
Laravel 5 has an awesome new function - Request Validation. It separates the logic of Validation into kind of a separate layer - Requests, which reside in the folder app/Http/Requests. After the form validation, it auto-magically shows error messages. But what if we want to customize them?
When you load a View from the Controller, there could be a situation when you don't actually know which view to load - the name could be dynamic. For example, you would use different Blade templates for sending emails. There is a neat function to assure your chosen View file actually exists.
Eloquent has a convenient feature called Accessors - you can define your own custom fields on top of existing in the database table. But then there's an Eloquent property $appends - should we use it or not? And what's the difference?
There is one annoying thing in Laravel RESTful approach - if you want to have Edit/Delete links in your tables, Edit is done easy with a link to URL, but for Delete you have to build the whole form. Is there a way to avoid it?
Laravel RESTful controller mechanism is a very convenient thing - we generate Controller, write {{ Form::xxxx() }} methods in Blade templates and it works like magic. But there's a little trick there which I want to talk about - it's PUT/PATCH/DELETE methods for updating the database entries.
Let's say we have DB table products, which is linked to table categories with a field products.category_id = categories.id, Eloquent helps us to define a relation easily. But what if the category gets (soft) deleted, but we still need to have that relationship to be returned for history reasons? You can use withTrashed() method here.
There is one small upgrade in Laravel 5.1 which breaks apps with earlier versions - it is related to <select> dropdown items. For a long time, Eloquent had a useful way of passing options to Form::select() - but adding an empty parameter doesn't work in Laravel 5.1 anymore. Here's what to do.
Artisan has a convenient command artisan down for an occasion when you need to put your web-project down for a while - for the case of deployment, maintenance or anything like that. Question - how to customize that temporary error page?
