Allow toggle of empty field in FormBuilder::select

[atrauzzi]

If a single select field is optional, convention is usually that you include a blank option along with the list of options.

When I'm assigning the list of values via a query from the database, I currently have no way of telling it to inject a blank option (which should appear first and checked by default if no value is set).

Ideally something like:

{{ Form::select(..., ..., ..., array('addEmpty' => true)) }}

...would do nicely!

[taylorotwell]

Can't you just prepend an element to the array you are passing. I don't want to bake more option arrays like this into the method.

[atrauzzi]

Yes, prepending does work, although I didn't know if it would be considered a data hack or not.

[phikes]

That answer is ignorant. You will be code duplicating, an option for this would be appropriate.

[JorisDebonnet]

This is the top result on Google for "laravel form builder empty option", that's why I am posting here.

It can be a pain to manually add an empty option for a Form::select element. A solution for id=>value Collections is passing $items = [''=>''] + Item::lists('value','id').toArray(). But that will need to be done every time an empty top option is required... it creates messy code.

Since the FormBuilder has moved to a separate repository however, let us move to laravelcollective/html.