Build a Forum with Inertia and Laravel

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38. Creating replies to discussions

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01. Introduction and demo

02. Getting set up

03. Modifying registration for usernames

04. Figuring out the forum layout

05. Creating and listing topics

06. Basic discussion listing

07. Pinning discussions

08. Tackling pagination in Inertia

09. Customising pagination text in Laravel

10. Showing a discussion

11. Setting up discussion posts

12. Listing through discussion posts

13. Adding more data to posts

14. Adding pagination to posts

15. Adding a post preview to discussions

16. Adding the last reply to discussions

17. Outputting discussion participants

18. Limiting participants in the UI

19. Ordering discussions by last post

20. Handling deleted users

21. Counting replies

22. Building our first filter

23. Highlighting current filters, and merging with pagination

24. Adding auth specific filters

25. Adding the topic filter

26. Scaffolding the new discussion form

27. Toggling the create discussion form

28. Keeping form state

29. Storing a new discussion

30. Discussion validation and authorization

31. Generating markdown for posts

32. Toggling the markdown preview

33. Fetching and displaying markdown

34. Adding a markdown shortcut toolbar

35. Dealing with SVG icons

36. Creating the reply form

37. Basic Inertia permission checking

38. Creating replies to discussions

39. Jumping to posts

40. Automatically scrolling to posts

41. Toggling post editing

42. Editing posts

43. Deleting posts

44. Deleting discussions

45. Setting up for best answers

46. Toggling the best discussion answer

47. Solved and unsolved filters

48. Indexing discussions for search

49. Searching discussions

50. Debouncing search

51. Adding mentionable functionality to forms

52. Indexing users for mentioning

53. Hooking up users for mentions

54. Detecting and storing mentioned users

55. Adding the mentioned filter

56. Adding mentions to the markdown toolbar

57. Adding mentions to the reply form

58. Fixing up some unauthenticated state

59. Fixing up post scrolling

60. Reviewing SSR (Server-side rendering)

61. Preventing parent posts from being deleted

62. Improving solution marking

Transcript

00:00

Now that we are done with our reply form, let's hook this up so we actually store a post on our discussions. Now we're going to start over by creating out a controller for this. So let's go ahead and create a post store controller here. And we'll go ahead and register the route for this first of all.

00:20

And we know that we need to be authenticated for this, so let's just go ahead and grab the structure of this. And we're going to go into discussions, choose the discussion that we want to actually post for, or post a post for. And then we'll go into this post relationship, keeping this nice and restful. So let's change the controller over to post store controller.

00:40

And then we'll just call this post.store within the context of a discussion. So over in our post store controller, let's just fill in the invoke magic method here. Right off the bat, we're going to go ahead and create out a form request for this. So let's go ahead and generate a request here.

00:58

And we're going to call this post store request. We know that we have within our discussion policy a reply permission or a reply authorization action, which we can use within here. So let's go ahead and fill in the post store request here. And we know that this is in the context of a discussion, so we can use this to authorize.

01:23

Let's do that first of all, since we've already got this set up. So let's say auth user can, and we're going to say reply to. And because we are within a request here, we can just go ahead and pass the discussion directly in from this request. That should authorize that for us.

01:41

Now, in terms of the rules, we just have a body here. So we're just going to go ahead and say this is required. We didn't have any rules for this when we created a discussion initially. So let's just leave that as it is.

01:52

We can always add to that later if we need to. OK, so how do we create out a post? Well, we can just do that really, really simply with the post model and making it, so not persisting it to the database just yet. And we can use the validated data from the form request, which will just give us back the body here and insert it.

02:12

So it's just a shorthand way of doing that with only the data that's been validated. The next thing is we want to associate this with a user. So we already have the relationship set up in there. So let's do that now. Post user associate.

02:27

And we're going to associate that with the currently authenticated user, which we can grab from the request. Next up, we want to associate this with a discussion, which we know we get through into here with root model binding. So let's go ahead and pass that discussion in. And we now need to speak about the parent.

02:44

So we know we've got this parent ID. If we look over in our post model at the moment, we don't have a parent method which we can easily do this with. So let's go ahead and create one out now. Again, that's going to belong to a post.

02:58

And because we are technically creating a relationship within the same table, we're just going to go ahead and give the parent ID as the column because Laravel won't choose that by default. So now what we can do is associate the parent here with the first discussion post. And we already have that post relationship set up.

03:20

Lastly, we're just going to go ahead and save this post out and then we're going to go and redirect back. We're going to modify this a little bit later because we want to jump directly to the post. And actually, let's fill that out now. So let's go ahead and set a redirect to a route here.

03:37

And let's do that to discussions show and then pass in the discussion just so we know that we're going back to the right page. Remember, we could also be on a completely different page while we're replying because we can browse the forum as we're replying to this. OK, so now that we've got our controller done, we've got the route for this. Let's just start to hook this up over in our reply form.

04:00

This is our create post form. And we know that we already have an action here, create post similar to the create discussion. So we're pretty much just going to do the same thing. We're going to post through to the route here so we can use our route helper posts and store.

04:18

And we need to pass through the discussion in here. So let's say discussion value. Remember, that comes from our use create post composable. And then we want to say, well, when this is successful, what do we want to do?

04:34

Well, we want to reset the form like we did with the discussion form. And then we want to hide the create post form because we don't want that to show after it has been created. OK, let's try this out. And then if there is anything we need to fix up, we can very easily do that and we'll keep our toolbar open just here.

04:52

OK, so let's go ahead and reply and just say, hey, hit reply. And yeah, here we go. Discussion show is not defined. That is a very quick fix.

05:03

Discussions show. And let's just try that one more time. It did work. It just didn't really bring us back.

05:09

So let's say hey again. And there we go. Great. So although it's not scrolling to the post we want at the moment, which is a little bit annoying.

05:17

Also, if this overlaps into the next page, so if this goes over into page two, it's always going to redirect us back to page one. So the user won't be able to see the post that they've just created. But we're going to fix that up later because there's quite a bit of logic and quite a bit of thought that needs to go behind that. But that is now our posts being stored with our new reply form.

Episode summary

In this episode, we connect the reply form to our backend so that users can actually create and store replies within discussions. We start by making a dedicated controller for storing posts (the PostStoreController) and registering the appropriate route, ensuring everything's nicely RESTful.

After setting up the controller, we implement form request validation and authorization, making sure only authenticated users with the correct permissions can reply to discussions. We validate the reply's body, then use Eloquent relationships to associate the new post with the current user and discussion.

We also handle parent/child relationships between posts, so replies are set up correctly. Once that's all done, we save the post and redirect the user back to the right discussion page. While we notice that the redirect always goes back to the first page (which isn't ideal if there are multiple pages of posts), we acknowledge this as something to tackle later.

By the end of the episode, we've fully wired up the reply form—so users can start replying to discussions and see their replies appear. There's still some improvement needed, like better post-redirect handling, but the main workflow is in place now.

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