How to call method dynamically on routes on Laravel? - laravel

Question

I'm a newbie with this and I need some help.
I'm developing some kind of music library and let's say I don't want to make a route for each artist so I have made this one:
Route::get('/{artist_name}', 'Artist_controller#{artist_name}');
I get the value of {artist_name} from my view and the route works, for instance, the artist_name may be John and the url generated is localhost:8000/John. But when it comes to look for the class in the controller it doesn't work. I have a class named John in my controller, but I keep getting this error when I try to access:
BadMethodCallException
Method [{artist_name}] does not exist.
So I guess the route isn't taking the value of {artist_name}. What I intend is the route to be processed like:
Route::get('/John', 'Artist_controller#John');
But as I said, I don't want to create a specific route for an artist.
I'd appreciate any kind of help. Thank You

Answer 1

There is no need to create a dynamic method for each artist. You could have one generic method in your controller that handles retrieving the proper artist information from the database and pass it to the view.
routes file:
Route::get('artists/{artist_id}', 'ArtistsController#show');
ArtistsController.php
class ArtistsController extends Controller
{
public function show($artist_id)
{
$artist = Artists::find($artist_id);
return view('artists.show', ['artist' => $artist]);
}
}
So if the user hits the following URL http://localhost/artists/4 the artist id of 4 will be passed to the show method and it will dynamically looks for an artist with that ID and pass an object of artist to your view.
Of course you are not limited to IDs in your URLs. You can use the name if it was unique and your code will be as the following.
routes file:
Route::get('artists/{artist_name}', 'ArtistsController#show');
ArtistsController.php
class ArtistsController extends Controller
{
public function show($artist_name)
{
$artist = Artist::where('name', $artist_name);
return view('artists.show', ['artist' => $artist]);
}
}
I suggest you read this documentation for more information about routing.

Answer 2

You can not have dynamic method (controller action) in a controller class. Instead you should define a method and pass the route parameter to that action.
In your route (web.php) file:
Route::get('/{artist_name}', 'ArtistController#artist');
then in ArtistController.php:
public function artist ($artist_name) {
// do stuff based on $artist_name
}
To get more info read these 2 documentation pages. Controller and Routing.