Is their any way to view body and response of a route?

[jeremykenedy]

Is their any way to view body and response of a route?

[zmorris]

Since this is literally the very first thing that people will try to do the first time they use Laravel Logger during development, I thought it would be useful to post an unopinionated solution that "just works" so that people can get real work done in a pinch.

The CreateLaravelLoggerActivityTable migration creates LONGTEXT fields (that can store up to 4 GB of data) for description, route and referrer. But we usually don't care about the referrer while working locally, so the following code stores the request body in the request referrer field before it's ever processed by the LogActivity class, so that we can examine form submits and other requests. It intentionally avoids the friction of having to create a new middleware file, so be sure not to commit it or push it to production:

---

Laravel:

Put this class declaration somewhere in app/Http/Kernel.php (or wherever you are using the LogActivity class). It can go at the bottom, so as to preserve the PSR-4 autoloading of class Kernel extends HttpKernel as the first class declaration:

class LogActivityWithBody extends \jeremykenedy\LaravelLogger\App\Http\Middleware\LogActivity {
    public function handle($request, \Closure $next, $description = null)
    {
        $request->headers->set('referer', print_r($request->all(), true));
        //\Request::instance()->headers->set('referer', print_r(\Request::instance()->all(), true));
        //throw new \Exception('LogActivity::handle was called');

        return parent::handle($request, $next, $description);
    }
};

Then replace this line:

protected $middleware = [\jeremykenedy\LaravelLogger\App\Http\Middleware\LogActivity::class, ];

With:

protected $middleware = [LogActivityWithBody::class, ];

The comments just show how to examine the global Request when you don't have a $request instance available, and how to use an exception to verify that your middleware is being called.

---

Lumen (untested but should work):

Replace this line in bootstrap/app.php:

$app->routeMiddleware(['activity' => \jeremykenedy\LaravelLogger\App\Http\Middleware\LogActivity::class, ]);

With:

$app->routeMiddleware(['activity' => get_class(new class extends \jeremykenedy\LaravelLogger\App\Http\Middleware\LogActivity {
    public function handle($request, \Closure $next, $description = null)
    {
        $request->headers->set('referer', print_r($request->all(), true));

        return parent::handle($request, $next, $description);
    }
}), ]);

If it complains that it can't find the class (because it was declared locally), you may need to store the anonymous class in a global, which can also be done inside a function if you need to:

global $class;

$class = new class extends \jeremykenedy\LaravelLogger\App\Http\Middleware\LogActivity {
    public function handle($request, \Closure $next, $description = null)
    {
        $request->headers->set('referer', print_r($request->all(), true));

        return parent::handle($request, $next, $description);
    }
};

$app->routeMiddleware(['activity' => get_class($class), ]);

You can also just create the class somewhere in the file like in the Laravel example.

---

More ways of getting the request body can be found at:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33005815/laravel-5-retrieve-json-array-from-request

$request->all()
$request->json()
$request->getContent()

...

\Request::instance()->all()
\Request::instance()->json()
\Request::instance()->getContent()

...

file_get_contents('php://input')
$request->input('key')
Input::get('key')

There are eleventeen different ways of getting the request body as a string, object or array for json, form-encoded key-value pairs and multipart form encoded sections, so YMMV.

If you're going to use this for production, you'll need to create a new middleware class file and most likely extend the storeActivity() method to include an additional field for the request body. You'll also need to add a migration to add a body column to the laravel_logger_activity table, which is beyond the scope of this comment. Libraries and frameworks should generally include a userdata or reserved field for exactly this purpose.

Hopefully someone can verify if the one-liner works in Lumen so that I can update this comment at some point.

[jeremykenedy]

It processes specific items and doesn't blindly record the data, there may be privacy and sensitive data issues on some cases if it did that.

[jeremykenedy]

@zmorris Good write up