Controllers and their uses in Laravel

Today we will study about the controllers used in this Controllers and their uses in Laravel tutorial.

• Controllers in any MVC architecture have been assigned a task of controlling the traffic between views and models. Controller is used for every resource of your application.
• Instead of defining all route-level logic in routes.php file, we can organize it in a controller class. Controllers can group related route level logic into a class.
• Controllers are stored in the app/controllers directory. This directory is registered in the classmap option of the composer.json file by default.
• All the controllers should extend the BaseController class. This class also resides in the app/controllers directory.
• Let us see how to write a controller class:

<?php
	class indexController extends BaseController
{
	public function index()
{
	return view::make(‘about’);
}	
}
?>

• This is a controller. After writing a controller there is a route entry done to register a route for controller action.
• The route entry is done as follows:

Route::get(‘about’,’indexController@index’);

• In general it’s syntax is given as:

Route::get(‘route.name’,’somecontroller@someaction’);
Route::post(‘route.name’,’somecontroller@someaction’);

• Let us know about different types of controllers:

• Implicit Controllers:
• Instead of defining multiple routes Laravel allows us to define a single route to handle every action in a controller.
• First we need to define a route using the Route::controller method.
• The controller method accepts 2 arguments, first is the base URI that the controller handles and second is the class name of the controller.
• For example: Route::controller(‘index’,’indexController’);
• Here we have to add methods to the controller by just prefixing them with HTTP verbs as shown below:

<?php
class ShowController extends BaseController
{
	public function getIndex()
{
	//
}

public function postProfile()
{
	//
}
}
?>

• RESTful Controllers:
• REST is simply a set of rules that govern how data transfer should happen in web pages.
• REST defines certain methods that are applicable for almost every type of resource in web application.
• REST is also a fundamental part of how internet works and so it makes creating web applications much easier.
• We can create RESTful controllers by prefixing controllers action name with HTTP verb as shown below:

<?php
	class indexController extends BaseController
{
		public function getAction()
{
			//get request handling
}	

public function postAction()
{
			//post request handling
}	
}
?>

• Registering the route is shown below:

Route::controller(‘index’,indexController);

• In general to register route to a RESTful controllers we use

Route::controller(‘route.name’,’ControllerName’);

• Controller middlewares:
• Middlewares may be specified on controllers route. It is shown below:

Route::get(‘profile’,[‘middleware’=>’auth’,’uses’=>’UserController@Profile’]);


• We can even specify controllers in our controllers constructor as shown below:

<?php
		class UserController extends BaseController 
		{

      		   public function __construct()
   		   {
     		     $this->middleware('auth');

      		   }
	             }

?>

• Let us have a look at the actions handled by the controller:

HTTP Verb	Action(Method)	Route Name
GET	index	resource.index
GET	create	resource.create
POST	store	resource.store
GET	show	resource.show
GET	edit	resource.edit
PUT/PATCH	update	resource.update
DELETE	destroy	resource.destroy

Thus we studied about laravel controllers in this Controllers and their uses in Laravel tutorial.

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