How can I conditionally validate a custom rule in Laravel?

Question

In my controller I have a store method that is validating the request data:

$request->validate([
    'title' => 'required',
    'description' => 'required',
    'date' => [
        'required',
        new DateFormatRule
    ],
    'closed' => 'nullable',
    'time_start' => 'required_if:closed,0',
    'time_end' => [
        'required_if:closed,0',
        new TimeDurationRule($request->time_start)
    ],
]);

closed is a boolean. If closed is false, the time_start and time_end fields are required. This seems to be working as expected.

However, if I submit a request with closed as true, I am getting caught in my custom TimeDurationRule:

'time_end' => [
    'required_if:closed,0',
    new TimeDurationRule($request->time_start)
], 

How can I make new TimeDurationRule($request->time_start) conditional? For example, if closed is true, I am manually setting time_end to null so time_start/time_end do not need a value (not required).

If I comment my custom rule out, everything works as expected.

Thank you for any suggestions!

Answer 1

You can pass $request->closed to your TimeDurationRule and then in the passes method of the rule, you can do something like this:

class TimeDurationRule implements Rule
{
    public $closed;

    public function __construct(/*all needed parameters*/, $closed)
    {
        $this->closed = $closed;
    }

    public function passes($attribute, $value)
    {
        if(!$closed){ 
         return true
        }

        // the rest of validation logic
    }
}

And then

new TimeDurationRule(/*all needed parameters*/, $request->closed)

You can read more about it here as well: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/laravel/create-custom-validation-rule-with-additional-parameters-implement-in-request

Hope it helps!