Best place to store an array in Laravel - laravel

Question

I'm using Laravel 5.2 and my app has the need for select boxes with half-hourly times in various different views throughout.
Here's an example of how the array data looks:
[
'00:00' => '00:00',
'00:30' => '00:30',
'01:00' => '01:00',
/* ... etc ... */
'18:00' => '18:00',
'18:30' => '18:30',
'19:00' => '19:00',
/* ... etc ... */
]
Obviously I don't want to put this in each controller that calls each view, but I'm wondering what the best way of storing it would be. So far, I've thought of the following:
1) A helper function that returns the array
2) A config file in app/config that contains the array
3) A database model (seems excessive)
4) A function that generates the list each time (performance concern?)
Can anyone think of a better way or suggest which one of the ways above would be best and why?

Answer 1

I have found a very good solution to this on Laracasts at https://laracasts.com/series/build-project-flyer-with-me/episodes/5
Here are the steps:
1) Create a file app/Http/Utilities.php:
<?php
namespace App\Http\Utilities;
class Time
{
protected static $times = [
'00:00' => '00:00', '00:30' => '00:30', '01:00' => '01:00'
/** etc ... **/
'22:30' => '22:30', '23:00' => '23:00', '23:30' => '23:30'
];
public static function all()
{
return static::$times;
}
2) In the view, add the following at the top:
#inject ('times','App\Http\Utilities\Time')
3) $times::all() can now be used within the view wherever necessary.

Answer 2

You can use Form Macro with Laravel Collective Package
Laravel Collective: https://github.com/LaravelCollective/html
An awesome example you can find https://github.com/rappasoft/laravel-5-boilerplate
See App\Providers\MacroServiceProvider.php

Answer 3

From my understanding of the question, this would be a perfect situation for View Composers, as it seems like you have some data that has to be generated on multiple views and/or in multiple controller methods.
The way I go about doing this:
Start by running php artisan make:provider ComposerProvider in your terminal.
This is what that provider could look like:
<?php
namespace App\Providers;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
class ComposerServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
/**
* Bootstrap the application services.
*
* #return void
*/
public function boot()
{
view()->composer(
[
'view_one'
'view_two'
], 'App\Http\ViewComposers\DashboardComposer'
);
}
/**
* Register the application services.
*
* #return void
*/
public function register()
{
//
}
}
There you can list all the views that need this data.
An example of how a View Composer could look like. I place these in the folder app/Http/ViewComposers, as the namespace suggests.
<?php
namespace App\Http\ViewComposers;
use Illuminate\View\View;
use Illuminate\Users\Repository as UserRepository;
class DashboardComposer
{
public function __construct()
{
}
public function compose(View $view)
{
$the_variable = 'Hello World';
$data = [
'some_very_important_variable' => $the_variable
];
$view->with($data);
}
}