What I'm looking for here, is an elegant way of creating a new Contact. As the image says, a Contact must have a "client_id".

Basically, my Client detail view has a link that's labelled "Add Contact". To my mind, it makes sense if this links to the ContactsController's create-method. That's where the first issue arises; the route for create, doesn't take a parameter by default, and I need the parent Client's id.

So, I edit my routes.php-file, exclude "create" from the resource-route and roll my own route for the create-method. Looks like this:

Route::resource('contacts', 'ContactsController', array('except' => array('create', 'index', 'show')));
Route::get('contacts/{clients}/create', array('as' => 'contacts.create', 'uses' => 'ContactsController@create'));

Next I have to add a hidden form-input to the create-method's view and give it a name of "client_id". Then I have to make client_id fillable in the Contact-model. I also have to add client_id as 'required' in the validation rules.

I'm using Laracasts's validation-package found here, meaning I have a separate class that's responsible for the validation of Contacts. This is where I have to tell Laravel that "client_id" is required. Subsequently, I now have to add client_id as a hidden form-input to my contact update-view as well (since the same validation is run on create- and update-methods).

This, to me, seems like a lot of workarounds for a relatively simple problem. I was just wondering if some of you guys knew of simpler ways to achieve this without abandoning resourceful concepts completely.

Thanks!