What is the cause of the "route not defined" error in this Laravel 8 application?

Question

I am working on a Laravel application that requires user registration and login.

Alter registration, a user should have the possibility to add more info to his/her profile.

For this purpose, I did the following:

In routes/web.php I have the necessary routes, including update:

Auth::routes();

Route::get('/dashboard', [App\Http\Controllers\Dashboard\DashboardController::class, 'index'])->name('dashboard');

Route::get('/dashboard/profile', [App\Http\Controllers\Dashboard\UserProfileController::class, 'index'])->name('profile');

Route::post('/dashboard/profile/update', [App\Http\Controllers\Dashboard\UserProfileController::class, 'update'])->name('update');

In the newly created Controllers\Dashboard\UserProfileController.php I have:

namespace App\Http\Controllers\Dashboard; use App\Http\Controllers\Controller; use Illuminate\Http\Request; use Auth; use App\Models\UserProfile;

class UserProfileController extends Controller
{
    public function index(UserProfile $user)
    {
        return view('dashboard.userprofile',
            array('current_user' => Auth::user()) 
        );
    }


    public function update(Request $request, $id)
    {
        $id = Auth::user()->id;
        
        $request->validate([
                'first_name' => ['required', 'string', 'max:255'],
                'last_name' => ['required', 'string', 'max:255'],
                'email' => ['required', 'string', 'email', 'max:255', 'unique:users'],
        ]);

        $current_user = User::find($id);
        $current_user->first_name = $request->get('first_name');
        $current_user->last_name = $request->get('last_name');
        $current_user->email = $request->get('email');
        $current_user->bio = $request->get('bio');
        $current_user->avatar = $request->get('avatar');

        $current_user->update();

        return redirect('/dashboard/profile')->with('success', 'User data updated successfully');
    }
}

In the view file that holds the form (resources\views\dashboard\userprofile.blade.php) I have:

<form action="{{ route('dashboard/profile/update') }}" enctype='multipart/form-data' method="post" novalidate>
    {{csrf_field()}}

    <div class="form-group">
        <input type="text" id="first_name" name="first_name" placeholder="First name" class="form-control" value="{{$current_user->first_name}}">
        @if ($errors->has('first_name'))
            <span class="errormsg text-danger">{{ $errors->first('first_name') }}</span>
        @endif
    </div>

    <div class="form-group">
        <input type="text" id="last_name" name="last_name" placeholder="Last name" class="form-control" value="{{$current_user->last_name}}">
        @if ($errors->has('first_name'))
            <span class="errormsg text-danger">{{ $errors->first('last_name') }}</span>
        @endif
    </div>

    <div class="form-group">
        <input type="text" id="email" name="email" placeholder="E-mail address" class="form-control" value="{{$current_user->email}}">
        @if ($errors->has('email'))
            <span class="errormsg text-danger">{{ $errors->first('email') }}</span>
        @endif
    </div>

    <div class="form-group">
        <textarea name="bio" id="bio" class="form-control" cols="30" rows="6">{{$current_user->bio}}</textarea>

        @if ($errors->has('bio'))
            <span class="errormsg text-danger">{{ $errors->first('bio') }}</span>
        @endif
    </div>

    <label for="avatar" class="text-muted">Upload avatar</label>
        
    <div class="form-group d-flex">
            <div class="w-75 pr-1">
                <input type='file' name='avatar' id="avatar" class="form-control border-0 py-0 pl-0 file-upload-btn">
                @if ($errors->has('file'))
                <span class="errormsg text-danger">{{ $errors->first('avatar') }}</span>
                @endif
            </div>

            <div class="w-25">
              <img class="rounded-circle img-thumbnail avatar-preview" src="{{asset('images/avatars/default.png')}}" alt="{{$current_user->first_name}} {{$current_user->first_name}}">
            </div>
    </div>

    <div class="form-group mb-0">
        <input type="submit" name="submit" value='Save' class='btn btn-block btn-primary'>
    </div>
</form>

The problem:

For a reason I was unable to figure out, whenever I am on the dashboard/profile route (in the browser), Laravel throws this error:

Route [dashboard/profile/update] not defined. (View: Path\to\views\dashboard\userprofile.blade.php)

What am I missing?

Answer 1

I applied an easy fix, thanks to the info received from the community:

I replaced <form action="{{ route('dashboard/profile/update') }}" enctype='multipart/form-data' method="post" novalidate> with:

<form action="{{ route('update') }}" enctype='multipart/form-data' method="post" novalidate>

Answer 2

The route() function accepts a name, not a URL: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/routing#generating-urls-to-named-routes

So you should have used route('update'). Though seeing your code, you might not realize the ->name() method should accept a unique route name. So you should make sure you don't have any other route named 'update'.

Some people do this: ->name('dashboard.profile.update'). You can see if you like this convention.