Yes, that’s why I used the sometimes rule: because the field in question may or may not appear in the validation data. The trouble is that combining the sometimes rule with certain other rules, like email, seemingly overrides this, making Laravel attempt to validate the field even when not present in the data.

I explain why in the question: the validation rules are defined in the Eloquent model class, not in the component. They are used across half a dozen different components.

Nope, that doesn’t prevent the validation either – it still fails the email rule.

Yes, as I said, it is not there in the data. There is no field for the username or password on this page at all, and when I output $validator->getData(), they are not present.

As a temporary workaround, I’ve altered the rules in the Livewire component to exclude them completely:

// Livewire component
public function rules() {
  return array_merge($this->user->rules(), [
    'username' => 'exclude',
    'password' => 'exclude',
  ];
}

But this is a hack and a workaround – the real solution would be to fix the base rule, which I’m sure must be possible somehow.

[Laravel 9, Livewire 2 – upgrading is not currently an option]

I have a Livewire component that validates a number of fields belonging to a User model. The validation rules are stored in the User class and pulled into the component from there.

Usually, when validating User models, I want to validate the username and password fields, but for this particular component, those two fields are not present in the data at all, so they should not be validated. The rules are set up like this:

// User class
public function rules() {
  return [
    "name" => "required|string",
    [other rules…],
    "username" => ["sometimes", "required", "email", "unique:App\Models\User,username"],
    "password" => ["sometimes", "required", "confirmed", Password::defaults()],
  ];
}

When I validate the component form, the sometimes rule for the password works as intended: the password field is skipped because it’s not present.

It doesn’t work for the username, though: even though there is no username field in the data, I still get an error message that “The username must be a valid email address”. If I remove the email rule, it works, but then of course it won’t validate whether it’s a valid e-mail address when it is present.

How can I tell the Laravel validator to completely ignore and skip validation if the field is not present in the data, but otherwise validate according to all the rules given?