How to send data from different controllers/actions to the same view? - laravel

Question

This is my first experience with Laravel, and so far I'm having some difficulties passing data to views. My app is a single page website with one menu on the top listing all the product categories and below there is a grid of thumbnails for each item or product. Visitors are able to filter the products by their category of choice.
Route::get('home/{category}', array('as'=>'itemshome', 'uses'=>'ItemsController#index'));
So in my ItemsControllers I fetch some items from the item model and pass them to the view.
class ItemsController extends \BaseController {
public function index($category)
{
return View::make('home/index', ['items' => Item::where('publishtime', '<',
date('Y-m-d H:i:s'))->where('category_id','=',$category)->paginate(24)]);
}
At this point I'm not sure if I should send data from the Category model to the home view using the ItemsController, or if it would it be a better approach to define a new CategoryController and pass the values from there.

Answer 1

You can't just use another controller to send data to the same view during the same request.
Either add it to the view make call:
return View::make('home/index', [
'items' => Item::where('publishtime', '<', date('Y-m-d H:i:s'))->where('category_id','=',$category)->paginate(24),
'categories' => Category::all()
];
Or, if the category data actually has nothing to do with the items controller but is needed by the view, you could register a view composer
View::composer('home/index', function($view){
$view->with('categories', Category::all());
});
Now every time when the home/index view gets rendered, categories will be injected.
You can actually place the view composer anywhere you want. However I recommend you add a new file app/composers.php to store all your view composers. Then you need to include it somewhere. For example in app/start/global.php at the bottom:
require app_path().'/composers.php';