Last Updated: 2024-04-24

When I went to edit an existing tax advisor via a form, the admin's email was showing in the form instead of that tax advisor's email. The advisor already had an email field set to "advisor@example.com" yet "adminuser@example.com" was showing.

The code for the form was as follows:

<?
  {{ Form::model($advisor, ["url" => $url, "class" => "step_1_form"]) }}
    {{ Form::text('email', $current_user->email) }}
    ...
  {{ Form::close() }}

Here is my misunderstanding: I expected the second parameter of Form::text() to only apply if there was no advisor email was present. But this wasn't how it worked. The second parameter overrode anything that already existed in the DB.

Referring to the htmlcollective docs (my form library), the precedence is:

• session data
• explicit passed-in value (i.e. what I had in the 2nd param)
• model attributes (i.e. what is grabbed from the DB)

i.e. My mental model was inaccurate and I made too many assumptions based on my experience with other web frameworks like Rails.

Lesson

Be sure to understand the precedence of defaults in form data and test them. In particular, the following cases need to be considered:

• no data is set (you should test that the default shows)
• data is set from a previous but unsuccessful form submission (previous submission data should show)
• data is already persisted in the DB and the user is now editing it (already persisted data should show instead of default passed in)