Translating Validation Messages

In Laravel, majority of validation error messages are good enough:

However, if you change the label, the validation message does not match the label:

Let's see how we can fix this.

Label and Field Name Mismatch - Translated Form Attributes

As the application grows, you'll have cases where the field name and label do not match. For example, I have a field called Order Date on the UI but the form has an ordered_at name:

Blade form

<div class="mt-4">
    <x-input-label for="ordered_at" :value="__('Order date')"/>
 
    <x-text-input id="ordered_at" class="block mt-1 w-full" type="date" name="ordered_at"
                  :value="old('ordered_at')"/>
 
    <x-input-error :messages="$errors->get('ordered_at')" class="mt-2"/>
</div>

This will result in the following validation message:

The ordered at field is required.

It is not that user-friendly as our name is Order date. Let's fix this by adding the attributes method to our Form Request class:

Form Request Class

use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest;
 
class StoreOrderRequest extends FormRequest
{
    public function rules(): array
    {
        return [
            'ordered_at' => ['required', 'date'],
            // ...
        ];
    }
 
    // ...
 
    public function attributes(): array
    {
        return [
            'ordered_at' => 'order date',
        ];
    }
}

With this, we've told that once we have a field named ordered_at - its visual representation should be order date. This will result in the following validation message:

The order date field is required.

To go even further, we can use a translation here:

Form Request Class

// ...
public function attributes(): array
{
    return [
        'ordered_at' => __('Order date'),
    ];
}

This will result in: The Order date field is required. - matching the label.

Validating Array of Fields

This one is tricky. You might see something like...