Laravel pass object from view to controller

Question

Looking for best practices, given these 3 tables:

Task (id, title, description) User (id, name) User_task (user_id, task_id)

My class/Object User has a function addToCompletedTasks(Task task) to add a task to his list of completed task (that adds the task into the table User_task).

I'm looking for best practice to send my completed task FROM my view TO my controller. Right now I'm sending an ID but I'm wondering if it's possible to send the object so I don't have to instantiate the task in my controller to add it to the completedtasks list.

public function insertCompletedTask(Request $request)
{
        $task_id = $request->input('task_id');

        $user = \Auth::user();

        $task   = Task::whereId($task_id)->first();
        $update = $user->assignCompletedTask($task);
}

Answer 1

You have to send the ID via a route

Route::get('/your-url/{id}', 'YourController@addCompletedTasks');

Then you need to have this function declared in your User model:

public function tasks(){
    return $this->belongsToMany('Task');
}

And then in your controller have this function:

public function addCompletedTasks($id) {
     // if you want to you can also just do 
     Auth::user()->tasks()->attach($id);
}

If you want to send it via POST in the request and not via the ID in the URL your function would need to be like that:

public function addCompletedTasks(Request $request) {
  Auth::user()->tasks()->attach($request->get('id'));
}

In either case you can't send a full php object or you will have to serialize it and deserialize it, easier to just send the ID.

But in my opinion you should check first if a task is related to the id first. But if you have this control on the database level it's ok.