Build a Forum with Inertia and Laravel

Sign in Get started

This episode is for members only

Sign up to access "Build a Forum with Inertia and Laravel" right now.

Already a member? Sign in to continue

Playing

62. Improving solution marking

Episodes

0%

Your progress

Total: 6h 54m
Played: 0m
Remaining: 6h 54m

Join or sign in to track your progress

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

Coming back to something else that we noted earlier on our discussion solution patch controller, if, for example, a user was to pass through a post ID that didn't belong to this discussion, what's actually going to happen is that's going to be set in this column here.

00:16

We really need to know that the post that we're marking as a solution within the discussion row in the discussions table actually belongs to that discussion. So basically, only posts within that discussion could be marked as the solution for that discussion. So let's go ahead and figure this out.

00:35

And I put topic here earlier, but of course, I meant discussion. So there are a couple of ways that you can achieve this. You can create out an if statement. So you could say, for example, take the discussion, go into posts,

00:49

and you could say something like contains and the post that we are looking for. So we'd have to define this somewhere else up here. Let's just make this really messy for now. Reference the post down here.

01:04

And then, of course, go ahead and check if it contains that post. Now, if it doesn't contain that post, then we could do something like abort, whatever you wanted to do. So let's just abort with a status 200 for now,

01:15

just to test this out, because this is not the solution that we're going to roll with. So when I click to mark this as the best solution, sure enough, it still works. We do get an issue here at the moment, because, of course, we are passing a null value down. So we'd need to take that into account as well.

01:32

So I think that for the purpose of this, this is not the best solution, because there are additional conditions around this. And it just doesn't really make sense. So what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of all of this.

01:41

And instead, we are going to, from here, access the discussion. We're going to go into posts. And we're just going to directly find. So kind of like what we were doing before, when we just said post find,

01:56

but this time, we're finding a post within the discussion post relationship. So that way, based on that relationship, we always know it has to exist within the discussion post. So we're going to go ahead and find. And let's just remind ourselves where this came from.

02:12

I think we called this. We just head over to our post. Let's find the solution section. And what do we call this?

02:20

Post ID. OK, so find request post ID. OK, so let's head over now and try this out. When I unmark this, it still works.

02:30

When I mark it, it still works. But now, if we were to pass through a post that didn't exist within that discussion, it just wouldn't work, because it wouldn't be able to find it. The worst case scenario here is it's just going to clear out the solution

02:42

if we try and do that, because we know we get a null back from here. Now, another thing that we could do, we don't necessarily need to do this, because we have already implemented this solution, is we could add some validation here just to make sure that this post actually exists.

02:57

So if you wanted to do that, if you were to roll with another solution, you're going to want to make sure that the post ID exists in general. So if it doesn't exist at all, then there's no point in even trying. So here we could go ahead and just say that this is required.

03:11

So that's pretty important. We could say rule exists. And we want to make sure that that exists within the post table under the ID column. So let's go ahead and pull in rule here from Illuminate Validation.

03:26

Now, this isn't going to work when we unmark it, because technically it does not exist then. So what we can actually do is set this rule to nullable as well. And if we come over, hit this.

03:38

That is, yeah, that's going to need to replace the required rule. So let's hit unmark. That works. Looks like, yeah, just the post model doesn't exist in there.

03:49

And let's try that again. There we go. So everything is working. We've got validation in place, which isn't completely necessary,

03:55

because we now know that whatever ID we pass in, whether it exists or not, is always being looked at within the discussion post. So there we go. Another fix just to improve the way that this works.

Episode summary

In this episode, we focus on improving how solutions are marked in a discussion-based app. We start by recognizing a potential issue: someone could attempt to mark a post as the solution for a discussion, even if that post doesn't actually belong to the discussion. Clearly, that's not what we want!

To fix this, we first try a quick-and-dirty if-statement check to see if the post belongs to the discussion, but quickly realize that's not the best way to do it. Instead, we improve our code and make use of Eloquent relationships: we use $discussion->posts()->find($postId) to guarantee we're only ever marking posts that actually belong to the discussion.

We also touch on validation—making sure the post ID actually exists in the database, and handling special cases like unmarking a solution (which should allow a null value). Finally, after some testing, we confirm that the feature now works exactly as expected, and users won't accidentally (or maliciously) mark posts from other discussions as a solution.

By the end of the episode, we've made the solution marking safer and more robust, thanks to clever use of relationships and validation.

Episode discussion

No comments, yet. Be the first!