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Extending Laravel Controllers

I’ve been working for a while with PHP, using Laravel, and having started from the bottom, I must say, I am excited to be here!!!

2017-12-20

Extending Laravel Controllers

I’ve been working for a while with PHP, using Laravel, and having started from the bottom, I must say, I am excited to be here!!!

What I’ve learned

When working with web controllers and trying to return JSON, I write code like:

return response()->json([ message => 'success' ]);

which makes sure that an HTTP 200 response is sent to the client, with the data:

{ "message": "success" }

Something I noticed

If we wanted to return an HTTP 404 response, we’d do stuff like:

return response()->json([ message => 'not found' ], 404);

It feels a little verbose, and we’re repeating code, especially the HTTP status code values.

What I did

Since every controller inherits from the BaseController, we can create our own Controller class to serve as our base.

class Controller extends BaseController {
  use ...;
}

In this controller, we can create a public function called notFound that returns a 404 JSON response.

public function notFound() {
  return response()->json([
    'message' => 'not found'
  ], 404);
}

What this means

Every controller that extends our Controller class can then use:

return $this->notFound();

to return an HTTP 404 response, which is less verbose and easily readable.

The Potential

You could decide to pass parameters into your response functions like:

public function notFound($message = null) {
  return response()->json([
    'message' => $message ?? 'not found'
  ], 404);
}

So you can have code like:

return $this->notFound('foo not found');

Also, HTTP 404 is not the only response we can wrap this way. We can have fun doing this for:

400 Bad Request

public function badRequest($message = null) {
  return response()->json([
    'message' => $message ?? 'invalid request'
  ], 400);
}

Which can be used like:

return $this->badRequest();

500 Internal Server Error

public function error($message = null, Exception $ex) {
  return response()->json([
    'message' => $message ?? 'an error occurred',
    'exception' => $ex
  ], 500);
}

Which can be used like:

return $this->error('sos');

So, have fun extending your controllers however you wish!!!

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