I've been working on an API for awhile now that has a sort of 'soft' api validation so I can use Backbone more easily on the front end. Basically the design principal has always been to only validate and update the attributes sent back that we care about. On the backend, I use the model's fillable array to limit this after validating the input array. This way we don't have to annoy people when they accidentally send back model data that we don't allow them to touch as the docs clearly state whats fillable. People seem to enjoy working with the API.
What we run into is a problem because we want to use things like 'createOrUpdate' for our backend stuff that's creating or updating models automatically. Basically we end up adding things to fillable that go against our user facing input validation. Trudging around the docs I came across 'forceFill' and other various 'force' methods, but noticed that they are missing from the more magical methods like 'createOrUpdate'. Seems like they should be methods, or at least boolean flags that can be passed to the methods to force, and maybe these options are built into Laravel 5+?
Before I go ahead and write my own methods in the base, I just wanted to ask if this is already built into 4.2 and I'm just missing it? I also wanted to create this thread as it may be informative to people still confused by how Laravel's mass assignment works.
If I don't get any feedback I'll probably just delete it.
