Failing validation returns 302

Question

Im writing phpunit tests. I write this test:

public function testValidationFailure(){
    $new_item_data = ['bad_param' => 'fancy_name'];
    $response = 
    $this->withHeaders(['identifier' => "identifier"])
    ->post("localhost/item", $new_item_data);
    $response->assertStatus(Response::HTTP_FOUND);
    echo "status:" . $response->status();
}

And I have this in api.php

Route::middleware('ensure.token')->resource('item', ItemController::class)->only(['store', 'destroy', 'update']);

The controller looks like this:

class ItemController extends Controller{
    public function store(Request $request): JsonResponse{
    try{
        $request->validate(['name' => 'required']);
        //code to insert new row in table
    } catch(Exception $e){
        return response()->json(['error' => "could_not_save_item"], Response::HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
    }

Now, why is the status returned equals to "302"? i would expect another code, more like "validation-failed"-like. 302 is "HTTP_FOUND", which to me does not sound like an error.
How can I take over when validation fails and send an http code that makes more sense? Or why is laravel returning this strange http code?

Actually Laravel automatically redirects. This is the feature they provided to not worry about redirecting manually if validation fails. — nice_dev, Dec 06 '22 at 07:52
Does this answer your question? [Disable request validation redirect in Laravel 5.4](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46350307/disable-request-validation-redirect-in-laravel-5-4) — nice_dev, Dec 06 '22 at 07:52

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 20 '23 at 15:52

This is because you are using ->post(), rather than ->jsonPost() in your test. Using post does a request with Accept: text/html and jsonPost does a request with Accept: application/json.

When encountering a validation failure, laravel internally conditionally asks if it should return json. If it should return json, it'll generate a 422 Unprocessable Entity response. If it shouldn't, it'll instead redirect using a 302 Found to the previous url by default.

Changing your ->post() to ->jsonPost() should fix your test.

Failing validation returns 302

1 Answers1