Multi-step Forms for Laravel

Arcanist is a package by Kai Sassnowski that takes the pain out of building multi-step form wizards in Laravel. Arcanist is a new package that requires both Laravel 8 and PHP 8:

Arcanist provides a simple yet powerful approach for adding multi-step form wizards to your Laravel application. It takes care of all the boring details so you can spend your time writing features, not boilerplate.

From the documentation page, the main features of this package include:

• Automatically registering all necessary routes for a wizard
• Form validation
• Persisting data between steps
• Keeping track of which steps have already been completed
• Resuming wizards at the last unfinished step

Setting up multi-step forms can become quite complex quickly. Using this package, you'll have to work with a few classes, such as the overall “wizard” class and the “steps” classes.

Here’s a look at a wizard class for user registration to give you a visual:

namespace App\Wizards\Registration;
 
use Arcanist\AbstractWizard;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
 
class RegistrationWizard extends AbstractWizard
{
    public static string $title = 'Registration';
 
    public static string $slug = 'registration';
 
    public string $onCompleteAction = RegistrationAction::class;
 
    protected array $steps = [
        //
    ];
 
    public static function middleware(): array
    {
        return [];
    }
 
    public function sharedData(Request $request): array
    {
        return [];
    }
}

Once you register the above wizard in the package’s configuration file, the package registers associated routes. As you can see above, the $steps property houses the wizard steps in an array. Here’s what a step might look like:

namespace App\Wizards\Registration\Steps;
 
use Arcanist\Field;
use Arcanist\WizardStep;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
 
class UsernameAndPasswordStep extends WizardStep
{
    public string $title = 'Username And Password';
 
    public string $slug = 'username-and-password';
 
    public function viewData(Request $request): array
    {
        return $this->withFormData();
    }
 
    protected function fields(): array
    {
         return [
            Field::make('username')
                ->rules(['required', 'unique:users,username']),
 
            Field::make('password')
                ->rules(['required', 'confirmed', 'string', 'min:12']),
        ];
    }
}

While we wanted to give you a visual of what the code for a step looks like, you’ll need to read through the getting started documentation to dive deeper into actions, views, and tying everything together.

To learn more about this package, check out the Arcanist documentation. The source code is available as open-source on GitHub. Please note that the documentation is still a work-in-progress.

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