Laravel Tips and Tricks

A. Eloquent
1. Route Model Binding
2. Model Observers
B. Blade
1. Loops
Other helpful Laravel tips and tricks

Eloquent

Route Model Binding

Route Model Binding is a great way to simplify code, and hence find records explicitly by their id. If the record is not found the result will be a 404. For example:

class ControllerExamples extends Controller
{
    // Instead of this:
    public function show($id)
    {
      $model_example = ModelExample::find($id);

      return view('view', compact('model_example'));
    }

    // Do this:
    public function show(ModelExample $model_example)
    {
      return view('view', compact('model_example'));
    }
}

There are two ways to override Route Model Binding. The first is by explicitly overriding the getRouteKeyName() function in the model by the column name:

class ModelExample extends Model
{
    // From id column to slug column:
    public function getRouteKeyName()
    {
      return 'slug';
    }
}

The second way to retrieve the Model is through the RouteServiceProvider (app/Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php). This way you can specify catches if not found through one column. So in theory you can retrieve a record by the ID or slug.

class RouteServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function boot()
    {
      parent::boot();

      Route::bind('modelexample', function ($value) {
          return ModelExample::where('id', $value)
          ->orWhere('slug', $value)
          ->first();
      });
    }
}

Model Observers

Eloquent models fire several events, such as the following: retrieved, creating, created, updating, updated, saving, saved, deleting, deleted, restoring, restored. By creating a Model Observer you can set global executable code each time a model class fires at one of the events. For example:

class ModelExampleObserver
{
    /**
     * Handle the recipe "creating" event.
     *
     * @param  \App\Recipe  $recipe
     * @return void
     */
    public function creating(ModelExample $model_example)
    {
        $model_example->user_id = auth()->id();
        $model_example->slug = str_slug($model_example->title);
    }
}

Blade

Loops

If by chance a foreach is used, and a partial is required for each iteration, then Laravel's @blade provides a special syntax for this. For example:

<div class="row justify-content-center">
  @each('view.name', $records, 'record', 'view.empty')
</div>