Chapter 5 HTTP Controllers

Outlines

• Introduction

• Basic Controllers

• Controller Middleware

• RESTful Resource Controllers

• Implicit Controllers

• Dependency Injection & Controllers

• Route Caching

Introduction

• Controller classes can group related HTTP request handling logic into a class

• Controllers are typically stored in the app/Http/Controllers directory

Basic Controllers

• All controllers should extend the base controller class

• We can route to the controller action like so:

– When a request matches the specified route URI, the showProfile method will be executed

Controllers & Namespaces

• We did not need to specify the full controller namespace when defining the controller route

• We only defined the portion of the class name that comes after the App\Http\Controllers namespace “root”

• Use the following code to register a route if full controller class is App\Http\Controllers\Photos\AdminController

Naming Controller Routes

• Like Closure routes, you may specify names on controller routes

• Once you have assigned a name to the controller route, you can easily generate URLs to the action

• To generate a URL to a controller action, use the action helper method

Controller Middleware

• Middleware may be assigned to the controller’s routes

• It is more convenient to specify middleware within your controller’s constructor

• You may even restrict the middleware to only certain methods on the controller class

RESTful Resource Controllers

• Resource controllers make it painless to build RESTful controllers around resources

• Use the make:controller Artisan command to create a controller– The Artisan command will generate a controller file at

app/Http/Controllers/PhotoController.php

– The controller will contain a method for each of the available resource operations

• You may register a resourceful route to the controller– This single route declaration creates multiple routes to

handle a variety of RESTful actions on the photo resource

Actions Handled By Resource Controller

• The following are the actions handled by Resource Controller

Partial Resource Routes

• Specifies a subset of actions to handle on the route when declaring a resource route

Naming Resource Routes

• By default, all resource controller actions have a route name

• Overrides these names by passing a names array with the options:

Nested Resources

• To define routes as a “nested” resource use “dot” notation in your route declaration:

• This route may be accessed with the following URLs photos/{photos}/comments/{comments}

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Supplementing Resource Controllers

• Define the routes before your call to Route::resource; to add additional routes to a resource controller beyond the default resource routes

Implicit Controllers

• To define a single route to handle every action in a controller class– Define the route using the Route::controller method that

accepts two arguments• The base URI the controller handles• The class name of the controller

– Add methods to your controller• The method names should begin with the HTTP verb

Assigning Route Names

• Pass an array of names as the third argument to the controller method if you would like to name some of the routes on the controller

Dependency Injection & Controllers

• The Laravel service container is used to resolve all Laravel controllers– You are able to type-hint any dependencies your controller

may need in its constructor

– The dependencies will automatically be resolved and injected into the controller instance

Method Injection

• To constructor injection, you may also type-hint dependencies on your controller’s action methods– For example, let’s type-hint the Illuminate\Http\Request instance on one of our methods

• Lists your route arguments after dependencies if you want to use a route parameter

Route Caching

• Using the route cache will drastically decrease the amount of time (100x faster) it take to register all of your application’s routes– Your route registration may even be up to!

• Execute the route:cache to generate a route cache– The cached routes file will now be used instead of your app/Http/routes.php file

– If you add any new routes you will need to generate a fresh route cache

• To remove the cached routes file without generating a new cache, use the route:clear command

HTTP Controllers Recap

• Understanding?

• Implementation?