Skip validation for nested data objects?

[ragulka]

As mentioned in another discussion, I am looking to recreate how Stripe handles ids and objects. Basically, I want the DTO to accept either a tax ID as string, or a full TaxData object.

I have added the TaxData::fromString magic creation method, which fetches the Tax model from the DB and populates the data object, so I can do something like ProductData::from(['name' => 'Foo', 'tax' => 'some_tax_id' ]); - which works great.

However, it looks like there is no way to skip TaxData validation for the tax property. Since I am validating the tax property myself to be a valid ID for a Tax model, and I am loading the data from the DB anyway, I don't need to validate things like tax.name, etc.

It seems that currently it's only possible to turn off validation for a property wholesale using WithoutValidation attribute.

Perhaps there is some way (and if not, consider this a suggestion) to only skip validation for nested data objects, while keeping the top-level validation rules for the property?

Or perhaps there is a workaround I could leverage? Ie, filling in the nested object in the payload before validating the nested DTO?

[rubenvanassche]

Hi @ragulka,

To be honest, I have no idea how we could solve such an issue. Technically something could be said that when data is created with an already initialized data object that the object is probably fine and shouldn't need extra validation. But I'm not sure that's completely correct and something we could only add in major version which will take probably yet another year.

For now I use this paragraph from the docs 😄:

Validation is probably one of the coolest features of this package, but it is also the most complex one. We'll try to make it as straightforward as possible to validate data, but in the end, the Laravel validator was not written to be used in this way. So there are some limitations and quirks you should be aware of.

In a few cases it might be easier to just create a custom request class with validation rules and then call toArray on the request to create a data object than trying to validate the data with this package.