old or session data

You could do this inside your controller (having to much logic in a view is never a good thing)

• Create 1 method in which you check session / request / old() for each of the form fields
• Call that method in all the steps to get formData from session / request / old
• Use $formData to populate your form.

So inside your controller you could have something like:

public function step1(Request $request) 
{
    // do stuff
    return view('step1', $data);
}
public function step2(Request $request) 
{
    // do stuff
    return view('step2', $data);
}

Which could be turned into something like:

public function step1(Request $request) 
{
    // do stuff
    $data['formData'] = $this->prepareFormData($request);
    return view('step1', $data);
}
public function step2(Request $request) 
{
    // do stuff
    $data['formData'] = $this->prepareFormData($request);
    return view('step2', $data);
}

private function prepareFormData($request) 
{
    $fields = ['all', 'form', 'fields', 'of', 'all', 'forms'];
    $data = [];
    foreach($fields as $field) {
        if($request->has($field) {
            $data[$field] = $request->get($field);
        } else if(\Session::has($field)) {
            $data[$field] = \Session::get($field);
        } else if(old($field)) {
            $data[$field] = old($field);
        }
    }
    return $data;
}

View:

value="@if(isSet($formData[$field])) {{ $formData[$field] }} @endif"

Thanks @lostdreamer_nl - this was enough to point me in the right direction :-)