Resource Controller for Laravel

General implementation for Laravel resource controllers.

By assuming a few conventions this package takes care of the repetitive implementation of the CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations on a base controller which you can fully customize and extend to your liking.

Installation

Require the package using composer:

composer require matt-daneshvar/rest

Usage

Extend the ResourceController and specify a $resource. Optionally define a $rules property to enforce validation before store and update operations.

<?php

use App\Task;
use MattDaneshvar\ResourceController\ResourceController;

class TasksController extends ResourceController
{
  protected $resource = Task::class;

  protected $rules = ['name' => 'required|max:200'];
}

The TasksController in the example above will now have general implementation for all CRUD actions. That includes:

• A create method that returns the tasks.create view.
• A show method that returns the tasks.show view injected with the relevant Task model.
• A create method that returns the tasks.create view.
• A store method that validates* the request against $rules, persists a Task object, and redirects user back to the url corresponding to the TasksController@index action.
• An edit method that returns the tasks.edit view injected with the relevant Task model.
• An update method that validates* the request against $rules, updates the relevant Task object, and redirects user back to the url corresponding to the TasksController@index action.
• A destory method that deletes the relevant Task object, and redirects user back to the url corresponding to the TasksController@index action.

*should the validation fail, user is redirected back() with all inputs and errors flashed to the session.

Routing

This package is designed to match Laravel's resource controllers. Creating a route rule for this controller is simple:

Route::resource('tasks', 'TasksController');

Limiting the exposed CRUD operations

While extending ResourceController automatically includes all CRUD operations in your controller, you may wish to limit the available operations available for your specific resource. You could achieve that by limiting the routes you expose in your application:

Route::resource('tasks', 'TasksController', ['only' => ['index', 'show']]);

Validation

Most real-world applications would validate store and update requests before persisting anything to the database.

Specifying a $rules property on your controller, informs the ResourceController to validate user's request against those rules in both store and update operations.

class TasksController extends ResourceController
{
  protected $resource = Task::class;

  protected $rules = ['name' => 'required|max:200'];
}

If you wish to use different rules for store and update operations, you may specify them separately:

class TasksController extends ResourceController
{
  protected $resource = Task::class;

  protected $storeRules = ['name' => 'required|max:200'];
  
  protected $updateRules = ['name' => 'required|max:200'];
}

Pagination

In most situations, your application's index would use pagination instead of dumping your models into the view all at once. The ResourceController assumes 20 items per page. To change this number define the $perPage attribute, or set it to null to disable pagination altogether.

class TasksController extends ResourceController
{
  protected $resource = Task::class;

  protected $perPage = 10;
}

Other configurations

While assuming a set of default conventions with sensible defaults to minimize code repetition in most cases, this package is also packed with a bunch of configuration options to allow you override the default behaviour when needed.

class TasksController extends ResourceController
{
  /**
   * The resource class name.
   *
   * @var string
   */
  protected $resource = '';

  /**
   * The number of models to return for pagination.
   *
   * @var int|null
   */
  protected $perPage = 20;

  /**
   * Path to all views for this controller (dot-separated path from views directory).
   *
   * @var string
   */
  protected $viewsPath = null;

  /**
   * Views for different resource actions.
   *
   * @var array
   */
  protected $views = [];

  /**
   * Validation rules.
   *
   * @var array
   */
  protected $rules = [];

  /**
   * Validation rules for store action.
   *
   * @var array
   */
  protected $storeRules = null;

  /**
   * Validation rules for update action.
   *
   * @var array
   */
  protected $updateRules = null;
}

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.