Where to place menu logic in Laravel?

laravel, menu, php

Solution

Note: this answer was written for Laravel 3 and might or might not work with the most recent Laravel 4

My favorite way of creating dynamic menu is achieved by separating the menu part from main layout and injecting the menu data via Laravel's Composer (don't confuse it with Composer PHP package manager, they are different things)

<!-- layouts/default.blade.php -->

<div id="header">Title</div>

<div id="menu">
    @render('parts.menu')
</div>

<div id="content"></div>
<div id="footer"></div>

<!-- parts/menu.blade.php -->

<ul>
@foreach($menuitems as $menuitem)
    <li>{{ $menuitem->title }}</li>
@endforeach
</ul>

Finally we can inject the variable via composer.

<?php 

// application/routes.php

View::composer('parts.menu', function($view){
    $view->with('menuitems', Menu::all());
});

This way everytime `parts/menu.blade.php` is called, Composer will intercept the view and inject it with `$menuitems` variable. It's same as using `with` on `return View::make('blahblah')->with( 'menuitems', Menu::all() )`

Hope it helps :)

Edit: If you don't like to have logics in `routes.php` you can put it in `start.php` and consider Jason Lewis' way of splitting the `start.php` into separate files.

Create a directory in `application` called `start` and fill it with some files.

    + application [DIR]
    \-> + start [DIR]
        |-> autoloading.php
        |-> composers.php
        |-> filters.php
        \-> validation.php

Then add these lines of code into the end of your `application/start.php`

require __DIR__ . DS . 'start' . DS . 'autoloading.php';
require __DIR__ . DS . 'start' . DS . 'filters.php';
require __DIR__ . DS . 'start' . DS . 'composers.php';
require __DIR__ . DS . 'start' . DS . 'validation.php';

You got the idea. Put the composer functions in composers.php.

Read the entire article here: http://jasonlewis.me/article/laravel-keeping-things-organized

Problem

Original source