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#scrambledrop: Scramble 0.12.23

#scrambledrop: Scramble 0.12.23

July 2, 2025

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Paginated results inferenceAuthorization documentation improvementsError-tolerant rules evaluationAnalyzing deeper calls in controller methodsWhat’s ChangedThanks!
Scramble PRO
Comprehensive API documentation generation for Spatie’s Laravel Data, Laravel Query Builder, and other packages.

Paginated results inference, improved documentation of authorization error responses, error-tolerant validation rules evaluation, and various type inference improvements.

Hey Laravel community!

Since the last blog post about 0.12.14 updates, there have been a lot of awesome changes in Scramble that make it smarter. In this post I’ll cover the most prominent ones.

Scramble is a Laravel API documentation generator that creates docs without requiring PHPDoc annotations: https://scramble.dedoc.co/introduction.

Paginated results inference

Previously, when using paginated responses, you had to manually annotate them for Scramble to document them correctly. Now, Scramble will automatically document paginated responses without manual annotation. This is done by inferring the type of paginators returned by the *paginate family of methods.

 /**
  * List available todo items.
 *
 * @response AnonymousResourceCollection<LengthAwarePaginator<TodoItemResource>>
  */
public function index()
{
    return TodoItemResource::collection(TodoItem::paginate());
}

This is especially useful when you include additional data alongside the paginated collection. Previously, it was difficult — or even impossible — to document both correctly due to annotation limitations.

namespace App\Http\Controllers;


use App\Models\User;
use App\Http\Resources\UserResource;


class UsersController
{
    public function index()
    {
        $users = User::query()->paginate();


        return UserResource::collection($users)->additional([
            /** The total count of users */
            'count' => (int) $users->count(),
        ]);
    }
}
Resulting documentation
user.index
get
https://api.example.com/user
Responses
200
·
OK
Paginated set of `UserResource`
Body
object
data
UserResource[]
required
+ Show properties
count
integer
required
The total count of users
meta
object
required
+ Show properties
links
object
required
+ Show properties

Authorization documentation improvements

Now Scramble recognizes possible 403 (authorization error) responses in more cases.

When you call Gate::authorize, Scramble will automatically document a 403 response:

public function store(Request $request)
{
    Gate::authorize('create', User::class);


    $data = $request->validate([
        'name' => ['required', 'string'],
        'email' => ['required', 'email'],
    ]);


    return new UserResource(User::create($data));
}

Also, when you use the middleware created by Authorize::using, Scramble will properly document the possible 403 response:

class CreateUserController extends Controller implements HasMiddleware
{
    public static function middleware(): array
    {
        return [
            Authorize::using('create', User::class)
        ];
    }


    public function store(Request $request)
    {
        $data = $request->validate([
            'name' => ['required', 'string'],
            'email' => ['required', 'email'],
        ]);


        return new UserResource(User::create($data));
    }
}

Thanks to @olivernybroe and @chrisvanlier2005 for these improvements.

Error-tolerant rules evaluation

Previously, when Scramble evaluated validation rules (to document request parameters), it could fail due to code that couldn’t be evaluated.

For example, in your update controller method, you might have used data from a real model that exists in the database:

public function update(Request $request, User $user)
{
    $data = $request->validate([
        'level' => ['required', 'integer', Rule::in($user->account->getAvailableLevels())],
    ]);
}

Scramble evaluated such validation rules without sending a real request. So, during documentation generation, it didn’t have access to a “correct” $user model (and what does “correct” even mean without an actual request?). As a result, documentation generation failed in such cases.

The new release introduces error-tolerant validation rules evaluation. In the example above, Scramble will no longer fail 🚀 This is achieved by evaluating each expression one by one. Scramble processes rules individually, and if it encounters an error — such as with Rule::in($user->account->getAvailableLevels()) — it will simply ignore that rule instead of failing the entire request documentation.

This resolves many cases where requests weren’t documented. Woohoo! 🎉

Analyzing deeper calls in controller methods

Ugh, this was a hard one.

Imagine you have the following controller:

class ItemsController
{
    public function __construct(private ItemsRetrievalService $listService) {}


    public function __invoke(Request $request)
    {
        $this->listService->ensureCanList();


        return ItemResource::collection($this->listService->get());
    }
}

And the following service class:

class ItemsRetrievalService
{
    /**
     * @throws AuthorizationException
     */
    public function ensureCanList()
    {
        // ...
    }
    // ...
}

You can see that the ensureCanList method is marked with a @throws AuthorizationException annotation in the PHPDoc. Prior to this update, Scramble did not document such code as potentially producing a 403 response. This was due to how Scramble analyzed the code: it minimized how much source code it parsed into an AST and how much of that AST it traversed. Since ensureCanList’s return type wasn’t used in the controller method’s return type, Scramble never even looked at it.

Starting from version 0.12.17, Scramble analyzes all methods called within controller methods! It still prioritizes performance — it reads only the PHPDoc and skips parsing and traversing the AST if the method’s return type isn’t used in the response.

This means you can now document exceptions using the @throws annotation, and if such a method is called in a controller, Scramble will correctly recognize and document the possible error response.

It might seem like a “nice-to-have” feature, but this update is a stepping stone toward improved type inference in Scramble. Imagine support for things like collect()->map() and beyond — can’t wait to make that happen. Stay tuned!

What’s Changed

Thanks!

Try out Scramble 0.12.23 and let me know what you think! Thanks for checking this post out. If you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, feel free to drop me a line to roman@dedoc.co

Scramble PRO
Comprehensive API documentation generation for Spatie’s Laravel Data, Laravel Query Builder, and other packages.