How to create a form that contains data for multiple entities? - laravel

Question

I've been trying to think of the best possible way to submit data for multiple entities in a single form.
My use case is that I have a table that contains multiple rows of different entities. I want the ability to go into 'edit' view where some of the columns will become textfields and allow for the value to be changed.
Example
Type | Name | Age
Animal | Eevee | 4
Animal | Sandy | 7
Human | Bob | 24
[Submit]
In edit mode they would be able to change the age for any of the entities. When the user hits save button for the entire list, I want the form to submit all the changes. The problem is that in the update method, I need to know which entities to update with which values
I was thinking of using name attribute to store the entity id of each entity on the input
<input name="{{$entity->id}} value="{{$entity->age}}"></input>
but Animals and Humans are stored in different DB tables. So in the update method of the controller I would have to take the name (which would be the id of the entity) and if it exists as a human
entityToUpdate = Human::find(id)
if entityToUpdate does not exist
entityToUpdate = Animal::find(id)
We use UUIDs in our DB so this would work but it doesn't feel right.
is there a way to group a couple inputs together in a form?
group1
type=animal
id = (Sandys ID)
age = 8
group2
type=human
id =(bobs ID)
age = 25

Answer 1

You could use array notation in your input names in order to get what you want on the server side:
#foreach($entities as $entity)
<input type="hidden" name="group[{{$loop->index}}][type]" value="{{$entity->type}}"/>
<input type="hidden" name="group[{{$loop->index}}][id] value="{{$entity->id}}"/>
<input type="text" name="group[{{$loop->index}}][age] value="{{$entity->age}}"/>
#endforeach
Then on the server side:
foreach(request()->get('group') as $entity) {
// $entity contains ['id'], ['type'], ['age']
}