Forem: Sanz

Useful Laravel Blade Directives

Sanz — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 03:52:13 +0000

Laravel Blade Directives are syntactic sugar functions that hide the underlying complex and ugly code. This make code more readable and clear.

Blade includes lots of built-in directives. But, this tutorial will help you with laravel blade directives that you’ll often reach out during your time in laravel.

1. Check whether the user is a guest or not using blade directive

This helps to check if the user is a guest i.e., not an authenticated user. For this purpose we use:

@if(auth()->guest())
    // The user is not authenticated.
@endif

To make this even easier, the blade provides us with @guest a directive. This helps to write code in a much shorter way.

@guest
    // The user is not authenticated.
@endguest

2. Check if the user is authenticated or not using blade directive

To check this, we can use the code given below:

@if(auth()->user())
    // The user is authenticated.
@endif

The above code works fine but as a programmer, we should always look for easy and shorter ways to write code. For that purpose, laravel provides blade directive which is @auth.

@auth
    // The user is authenticated.
@endauth

To combine the two directives we can use else:

@guest
    // The user is not authenticated.
@else
    // The user is authenticated.
@endguest

3. Include first view if it exists else include second view

Most of the websites nowadays have multiple themes. This might require us to include a file if it exists else include another file. We can easily achieve this by using laravel:

@if(view()->exists('first-view-name'))
    @include('first-view-name')
@else
    @include('second-view-name')
@endif

We can write the above code in much easier and shorter way with blade.

@includeFirst(['first-view-name', 'second-view-name']);

You can continue this post on https://laravelproject.com/useful-laravel-blade-directives/

Different Ways to Redirect User

Sanz — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:23:12 +0000

redirect() is one of the most used and popular helper function. This function redirects users to different URLs of the website. By using this method, we can redirect the user to pages with or without data.
Redirect to different URL

This is the most and simplest form in which the redirect method is used. We can redirect a user to the homepage by simply using the method below:

return redirect('/');

Users can also pass parameters inside the redirect method. The parameters given in the method will be added to the URL of the base application.

return redirect('contact');

Likewise, users can also pass more parameters:

return redirect('user/profile');

back() in Laravel

If the user wants to perform some sort of tasks and redirect back to the same page then the user can use back(). This method is also really helpful.

return redirect()->back();

Redirect to Route

Users can also name the routes in the application for consistency. Some users call named routes instead of using URLs. Let’s see an example to make this concept clear.

return redirect()->route('profile.index');

We can also pass the second parameter in route() in the form of an array. Let's see an example of a parameterized route.

Route::get('post/{id}', 'PostController@edit')-name('post.edit');

We can write the above above in simpler form which is here below:

return redirect()->route('post.edit', ['id' => $post->id]);

Read the details of the post in https://laravelproject.com/different-ways-to-redirect-user/.

How to Improve Routing In Laravel

Sanz — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 04:17:05 +0000

Routing allows the user to route application requests to its appropriate controller. Laravel has inbuilt API which is really helpful and time saving. Hence, it is important for newcomers to know and extend their knowledge about routing.

Users can learn about routing technique basics from here. Please go through the link to get more familiar with routing.

Here are a few tricks that can help you to use routing in Laravel:
Using Custom Namespace

Users can define namespace for a group of routes using fluent routing API.

Route::namespace('Admin')->group(function () {
    // Controllers Within The "App\Http\Controllers\Admin" Namespace
});

Run the command given below to create controller in App\Http\Controllers\Admin:

php artisan make:controller -r Admin/UsersController

After running the command, routes/web.php will look like this:

Route::namespace('Admin')
    ->prefix('admin')
    ->group(function () {
        Route::resource('users', 'UsersController');
    });

Debug Routes

To find or debug all defined routes, users can run php artisan route:list . Basically what this command does is that it helps to see name of all routes and attached middleware to the route.

php artisan route:list
+--------+----------+----------+------+---------+--------------+
| Domain | Method   | URI      | Name | Action  | Middleware   |
+--------+----------+----------+------+---------+--------------+
|        | GET|HEAD | /        |      | Closure | web          |
|        | GET|HEAD | api/user |      | Closure | api,auth:api |
+--------+----------+----------+------+---------+--------------+

If you are interested, you can continue this post on https://laravelproject.com/how-to-improve-routing-in-laravel/.

10 Laravel 7 Eloquent Tricks

Sanz — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 11:29:15 +0000

Laravel Eloquent ORM provides a whole lot of useful functionality which allows you to work with your database tables and relationships using an eloquent expressive syntax.

So, In here are some of the features which you might often reach out for ease of use and cleaner code in your laravel project.

Finding first record or records

Here’s an example of finding a post with id.

// Instead of this
$post = Post::find($id);

if(!$post) {
   abort(404);
}

// Do this
$post = Post::findOrFail($id);

Or, you can even find multiple records at once by passing array of ids as second argument.

$posts = Post::find([1,2,3]);

Even specify id with the fields to select as the second argument.

$post = Post::find(1, ['title', 'description']);
$post = Post::findOrFail(1, ['title', 'description']);

Model booted() method

In this method, you can specify what to do on different model events such as creating, updating, deleting etc by passing a closure function.

class User extends Model
{
    public static function booted()
    {
        static::creating(function ($user) {
            // delete comments
            // delete images
        });

        static::updating(function ($post) {
            // update comments
            // update images
        });
    }
}

Change default model properties

These are only few of the default properties of an eloquent model you often would reach out. You can change the values according to your needs.

class Post extends Model
{
    // The table associated with the model.
    protected $table = 'posts';

    // fields that can be filled using mass assignment Post::create()
    protected $fillables = ['title' , 'description'];

    // Eager load relations everytime you fetch posts
    protected $with = ['comments'];

    // appends accessors to the model's array form.
    protected $appends = ['formatted_date', 'short_title'];

    // The primary key associated with the table.
    protected $primaryKey = 'post_id';

    // Indicates if the IDs are auto-incrementing.
    public $incrementing = false;

    // Indicates if the model should be timestamped.
    public $timestamps = false;

    // The storage format of the model's date columns.
    protected $dateFormat = 'U';

    // change the names of the columns used to store the timestamps
    const CREATED_AT = 'creation_date';
    const UPDATED_AT = 'last_update';
}

Counting Related Models

you can retrieve the number of results from a relationship without actually loading them you may use the withCount method.

Define a relation comments():

public function comments() 
{
    return $this->hasMany(Comment::class);
}

Then, you can use like this:

$posts = Post::withCount('comments')->get();

foreach ($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->comments_count;
}

If you find this useful, you can continue on https://laravelproject.com/10-laravel-7-eloquent-tricks/

Laravel Timestamp Tricks

Sanz — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 13:49:39 +0000

There are various interesting things that a user can do with laravel timestamp. Some of which are:

Change Timestamp Column Name

If the user has non-laravel database as well as differently named timestamp column then there is no need to panic.

Lets say user has created_time and updated_time in timestamp column. User can specify it in model:

class Role extends Model
{
    const CREATED_AT = 'created_time';
    const UPDATED_AT = 'updated_time';

Disable Timestamps

If user doesn’t have time column but tries something like Model::create($arrayOfValues). As a result, he/she will get a SQL error.

For solving this problem, user can disable automatic timestamp by adding one property.

class Role extends Model
{
    public $timestamps = FALSE;
}

Before Laravel7, the datetime would be in format of 2019-12-02 20:01:00. However now in laravel7, date time is in format of 2019-12-02T20:01:00.283041Z.

So, if you need to customize timestamp format, set the $dateFormat property on your model which determines how attributes are stored in database.

class Flight extends Model
{
    /**
     * The storage format of the model's date columns.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $dateFormat = 'U';
}

Order Timestamp latest and oldest

User can order data by timestamp using two shortcut methods which are:

User::latest()->get();

The above code is for getting latest time. As for getting oldest timestamp, the code is;

User::oldest()->get();

If you are interested, there are a lot more of these in https://laravelproject.com/laravel-timestamp-tricks/

Quicker Way to Seed Records in Laravel

Sanz — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 09:03:12 +0000

Sometimes, there might be a situation where you need to insert a lot of test data into the database. Usually for testing purposes and performance in laravel.

However, seeding huge amount of records can take exceptionally long time and is not ideal when you’re in a state where you have to frequently seed database.

So, let’s try to improve the seeding time so that we won’t have a hard time waiting for it to finish.

https://laravelproject.com/optimize-database-seeder-in-laravel-for-faster-seeding/