Laravel 9.8 Released

The Laravel team released 9.8 with accessing default form data from an Eloquent model, custom log levels per exception type, discovering anonymous components in additional paths, and more:

Laravel 9.8.0 is available today and includes several cool new features! 🔥

First, a quality of life boost for the "old" helper. You can now pass a model as the second, "default" argument. The function will assume the attribute name based on the first argument. ✅ pic.twitter.com/1Mee6Tv20j

— Taylor Otwell 🪐 (@taylorotwell) April 12, 2022

#The "old" Form Helper Accepts a Model

Andrew Arscott contributed an update to the old() helper that allows a model as the second default argument:

<input type="text" name="name" value="{{ old('name', $user->name) }}">
 
{{-- 🔥 --}}
<input type="text" name="name" value="{{ old('name', $user) }}">

#Allow a Custom Log Level in Exception Handling

Tom Witkowski contributed the ability to customize the log level for reported exceptions in the exception handler:

use PDOException;
use Psr\Log\LogLevel;
 
/**
 * A list of exception types with their corresponding custom log levels.
 *
 * @var array<class-string<\Throwable>, \Psr\Log\LogLevel::*>
 */
protected $levels = [
    PDOException::class => LogLevel::CRITICAL
];

See Pull Request #41925 for implementation details.

#Discover Anonymous Blade Components in Additional Paths

Ralph J. Smit contributed the ability to discover anonymous Blade components in additional paths:

public function boot()
{
    Blade::anonymousComponentNamespace('flights.bookings', 'flights');
}

Here's an example of anonymous component usage:

<x-flights::panel :flight="$flight" />

#Set Factory Method

Ralph J. Smit contributed a model factory set() method to set a single model attribute:

// Before
EloquentModel::factory()
    ->create(['name' => 'foo']);
 
// After
EloquentModel::factory()
    ->set('name', 'foo')
    ->create();
 
// Before
EloquentModel::factory()
    ->someMethod()
    ->create(['country' => 'NL']);
 
// After
EloquentModel::factory()
    ->someMethod()
    ->set('country', 'NL')
    ->create();

#Release Notes

You can see the complete list of new features and updates below and the diff between 9.7.0 and 9.8.0 on GitHub.