Form input values with Laravel

There are a few options for working with update forms in Laravel 5. To keep my views cleaner, I prefer using the HTML/Form helper library from Laravel Collective. It's well documented and provides form-model binding out of the box, which handles default values without having to add the logic to your view. Just add the library via Composer ("laravelcollective/html": "5.2.*") and add the service provider and alias to your config/app.php. The HTML helper previously shipped with Laravel 4, but was moved to an external library when Laravel 5 was released.

If you prefer to avoid extra libraries, this post in the Laracast forum has a complete example of an update form with prepopulated fields.

You should use Form Model binding and partials.
First create 3 files - create.blade.php, edit.blade.php, _form.blade.php. In _form.blade.php write something like that:

{!! Form::label('title', 'Title:') !!}
{!! Form::text('title', old('title')) !!}

create.blade.php

{!! Form::open(['route' => 'someroute']) !!}
@include('_form.blade.php')
{!! Form::submit('Create') !!}
{!! Form::close() !!}

edit.blade.php

{!! Form::model($model, ['route' => 'someroute']) !!}
@include('_form.blade.php')
{!! Form::submit('Save Changes') !!}
{!! Form::close() !!}

Read more about it here: https://laravelcollective.com/docs/5.2/html#form-model-binding

Explanatory update:
With Form Model binding all attributes that model have will be putted to form fields. So for example, our model have title field, so if we open form like so: Form::model($model) and put Form::text('title') field, it will be auto filled by plugin.

With form and localization I use 3 packages in every projects I have done:

• https://github.com/LaravelCollective/html
• https://github.com/Propaganistas/Laravel-Translatable-Bootforms
• https://github.com/dimsav/laravel-translatable

Clean, easy for reading and contributing.

Or... instead of having a ternary every time in the view, you could just allow the same variable that you are using in the edit view to be available for the create view and then just assign that variable to an empty instance of the model which will allow each property of the object to have empty values. This would be done in the controller instead of the view.

So instead you could just do:

public function create()
{
    $user = New User;
    return view('add_user')->with('user', $user);
}

as edit might be something like

public function edit($id)
{
    $user = User::find($id); (or auth session id or whatever)
    return view('edit_user')->with('user', $user);
}

That way you could just have:

old('name', $user->name) 

in the form partial with $user->name as the default, which would be showing up as an empty string in the create view and showing the actual data in the edit view.