This question regards the structure of applications when using laravel.
I have a view for making a sale/purchase from a company. This single view contains a client search, product list, service list and a staff list. Each of the items listed above has their own model. In the view, i would say search for a client which will call a function within the controller and populate a list. Same for the products and services etc etc.
What confuses me is that for the client search i would click a button that would fire to a url like /clients/search/search string, which would return the array of clients to display on the page. This function seems as if it would be appropriate within the client controller. I am unsure as to how i would be able to maintain the information from the client search and other parts of the sale to then submit it all together under one single controller (let's call it InvoiceController).
Can controllers share the functions from other controller? Do i simply store the information in a session variable? Do i simply put all relative functions to this sale under the InvoiceController?
Thanks for any help!
I would do a search for clients against the client controller, then when you select the client add this (client_id) to your invoice form. then save this with other invoice info via the invoice controller
After much deliberation, it appeared that AJAX was the simplest answer. In this case i used Angular JS and had that running a controller to fetch each segment of the Invoice, then use the main InvoiceController in Laravel to fire the final update.
Related
Background
Let us consider a hypothetical scenario. Suppose we have five different tables in our database,
Customers
Categories
Products
Orders
OderDetails
Our client wants us to add a search bar to the frontend, where a user can search for a specific product and upon tapping the search button, matching products has to be displayed on the frontend.
My Approach for Tackling This Problem
In order to add the aforementioned functionality, I came across the following strategy.
👉 I would add an input box to ender the product name and a submit button.
👉 Upon pressing the submit button, a GET request will be sent to the backend. On the query parameters, the product name that has been entered by the user will be included
👉 Once the GET request is received to the backend, I will pass it down to the ProductsController and from within a method defined inside the ProductController, I will use the Product model to query the products table to see if there are any matching results.
👉 If there are any matching results, I will send them to the frontend inside a JSON object and if there aren't any matching results, I will set a success flag to false inside the JSON object and send it to the frontend
👉 In the frontend, if there are any matching results, I will display them on the screen. Else, I will display "No Results Found!"
Problem with My Approach
Everything works fine if we only want to search the products table. But what if, later our client tells us something like "Remember that search functionality you added for the products? I thought that functionality should be added to orders as well. I think as the list of orders by a user grows and grows, they should be able to search for their previous orders too."
👉 Now, since in our previous approach to search products was implemented in the ProductController using the Product model, when we are adding the same functionality to Orders, WE WOULD HAVE TO DO THE SAME THINGS WE DID IN THE ProductsController AGAIN INSIDE THE OrdersController USING THE Order model. It does not take seconds to understand that this leads to duplication of code.
Problem Summary
❓ How do we add an API endpoint in laravel for a search functionality that can be used to search any table in our database and get results, instead of the search functionality being scoped to a specific controller and a corresponding model?
A good start would be to create a trait called something like searchable and add it to all the models you want to search and put any shared logic between the different models in there. Possibly you'd want to manually allow different columns so in each model you have an array of searchable columns which you'd refer to in your trait.
Your controller would have to point to the related model and call a method in the trait that searches.
As others have pointed out this is a high level question so I won't go too much in detail. Of course there are a million ways to implement this, just try and keep shared logic in place.
in Laravel i want to do a page with a search box and a form (the route could be /products)
I want to retrieve information using search box typing id from a db and populate the form.
I request datas with the route for example /products/{id}
But in the controller i use the same function products($Request request) with if the id exists do something if no do other things, or there are two different functions?
Thx
Please go through the Laravel Resource Controllers.
To show list of products i.e. /products, create a index() method. To show a specific product i.e. /product/{id}, create show() method.
Probably is better use the same function, if id exist, return the page with the values filling the form, if not returns the same page but with a message showing that product doesn't exist
Let's say CRUD operations are performed on three tables in a single controller method.
Is it possible for me to get all the tables names on which CRUD operations are performed in the middleware.
As of now, when I submit a form I can only access those inputs from the request in the middleware, but when I insert three records into three different tables in a single controller action am not able to access the table names in the middleware.
Any help is much appreciated.
I don't think that it is possible to get table name automatically. You will have to right custom logic in middleware for that controller action. Because the response object we get in middleware after the execution of controller method is html, json, etc response which is to be sent to client.
I have quite a complex class that has three one-to-many relationships and two many-to-many relationships with other classes. What I would like to do is to enable the user to fill all the details one by one - in one step or even better in multiple steps (wizard).
My class is called PeriodicTask - user has to select one Server object (which represents SQL Server instance ) and depending on the selection I need to present the user with the ability to select which databases he wants to use ( the best option would be to use checkboxes). I don't really know how to achieve this.
I would start with creating an action that returns JSON with databases for the selected server. It'll be invoked by jQuery. So far so good, but what to do then?
Should I add <input type="checkbox"> to the form for every database or maybe create another form and post to some other action? How to parse that when the form is submitted? Can I split it somehow into smaller steps ? HTTP is stateless so I somehow need to pass or remember the data that was previously submitted - how?
PS> I'm using Entity Framework here, so part of the class hierarchy is as follows:
You could do it like this:
User selects server instance from
dropdownlist.
After selection dropdownlist fires "change "event, handler of
which loads databases list to form using ajax (your action can provide JSON or html with checkboxes)
User selects checkboxes and presses
submit button
On submit you collect
checked item and post to action
using javascript
I would look at creating helpers for each of the options that would be self contained, they could maintain the state themselves.
Another cool option would be to create a tree view, where the root level is your server and next level is database. Load the data into a ViewModel so that it can be used as the data source for a tree view. It seems like a nice interface for what you have.
Believe it or not the Microsoft site is a great place to start when learning MVC
http://www.asp.net/mvc
I am working on a custom Joomla MVC component.
My view has a form where the user enters an ID. I have retrieved the ID ($input_id) in the controller. Now I need to query the database to get the name WHERE ID = $input_id, then write the name to a different database table.
Can this all be done within the controller or do I have to pass my variables to the model somehow? Not sure of the correct way to achieve this within the MVC framework.
All data and data manipulation should be done in the model (e.g. model your data). The controller is there to determine the path of execution and which methods should be called (e.g. the manager aka controller determines what needs to be done).
Have a look at this tutorial which will help you understand MVC for Joomla better by taking you through the development of a simple component.