Should this be middleware?

Question

I have two fields in almost every table of my DB, they are created_by and modified_by. So, right now I have this in my controller:

$request['created_by'] = Auth::user->id;
$request['modified_by'] = Auth::user->id;

I was thinking that I should turn this into middleware or something a little more RESTful but I don't know how I would go about this. It is being used in 100% of my store methods right now, but it's possible that down the road I will have a table that doesn't have these two fields, which is where I get confused.

Answer 1

Middleware job is to process requests, however you need here to control the model creation and update. So in my opinion, I would add those parts in model events, and remove them from all Controllers. So once a model is creating or updating, an event is triggered to change those parameters/attributes, just before saving the model.

This can be achieved easily as per the documentation:

In your AppServiceProvider:

<?php

namespace App\Providers;

use App\User;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;

class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    /**
     * Bootstrap any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function boot()
    {
        User::creating(function ($user) {
            if ( ! $user->isValid()) {
                return false;
            }
        });
    }

You can replace User with your model name, and make sure to import it.