In this episode, we tackle an important security and user experience issue: validating the subscription plan during checkout. Currently, our app just grabs the plan from the URL without checking if it actually exists. This can lead to confusing errors if someone messes with the URL and enters a bogus plan ID.
We walk through how to add proper validation to handle this gracefully. The simple solution is to use Laravel's abort_unless
helper. This way, if the plan can't be found, we immediately show a 404 error instead of letting the app crash. We look at how to wrap our existing code in this helper and test out what happens when an invalid plan is entered.
We also briefly discuss an alternative: using an if statement to check for the plan, which allows more flexibility—like logging or redirecting before handling the error. Ultimately, we stick with abort_unless
for its simplicity, since users are unlikely to hit an invalid plan unless they're tinkering with the URL directly. By the end of the video, our checkout is much more robust!