Fluent Date Validation in Laravel 11.40

The Laravel team released v11.40, which includes a fluent date validation class, pending Eloquent attributes, dump helpers for HTTP Response instances, and more.

Fluent Date Validation

Michael Nabil contributed a new, customizable Date validation rule in Pull Request #53465:

The Date rule simplifies date validation by offering chainable methods that allow for complex date requirements directly within the rule definition. This enhancement includes methods to specify date formats, enforce that dates are before or after specific dates (including "today"), and to ensure dates are on or before/after specified constraints.

The Date rule provides defaults for basic date validation, as well as methods to create complex date validation needs, such as defining an end date that is compared against a start date, and many other possibilities:

use Illuminate\Validation\Rules\Date;
 
public function rules()
{
    return [
        'start_date' => [
            'required',
            new Date, // Defaults to validating the date
        ],
        'end_date' => [
            'required',
            (new Date)->after('start_date')->before('2025-01-01'), // Ensures end date is after start_date and before 2025-01-01
        ],
        'birth_date' => [
            'required',
            (new Date)->format('d/m/Y')->beforeToday(), // Validates birth_date is before today in 'd/m/Y' format
        ],
    ];
}

Methods available

format($format): Specifies a date format for validation. Defaults to 'Y-m-d' if not specified.
afterToday(): Ensures the date is after today’s date.
beforeToday(): Ensures the date is before today’s date.
after($date): Ensures the date is after the specified date.
afterOrEqual($date): Ensure the date is on or after the specified date.
before($date): Ensures the date is before the specified date.
beforeOrEqual($date): Ensure the date is on or before the specified date.
afterOrEqual($date): Ensures the date is on or after the specified date.
beforeOrEqual($date): Ensures the date is on or before the specified date.
between($from, $to): Ensure the date is between two dates.
betweenOrEqual($from, $to): Ensure the date is between or equal to two dates.

Note: At the time of writing, there's a fix that has not been tagged/released yet related to this feature. Since it is a new feature, it does not break existing apps and hopefully will be resolved soon.

See Pull Request #53465 for further details.

Dump Helpers for Laravel's HTTP Client

Craig Morris contributed new helper methods for the Response object returned by the HTTP client. These signatures match the TestResponse class if you're familiar with using those:

Http::get($url)->dump($key = null);
Http::get($url)->dd($key = null);
Http::get($url)->dumpHeaders();
Http::get($url)->ddHeaders();

Pending Attributes

@tontonsb contributed Eloquent pending attributes, using the withAttributes() method:

Doing ->withAttributes(['key' => 'value']) will instruct the Builder instance that the specified attributes must be added to new model instances if you create a model and used as where conditions if you end up doing a select.

// in the relationship on the User model
public function hiddenPosts(): HasMany
{
    return $this->posts()->withAttributes('hidden', 'y');
}
 
// in the scope on the Post model
public function scopeHidden(Builder $posts)
{
    $posts->withAttributes('hidden', 'y');
}

See Pull Request #53720 for details on the implementation and discussion of this feature.

Release Notes

You can see the complete list of new features and updates below and the diff between 11.39.0 and 11.40.0 on GitHub. The following release notes are directly from the changelog: