Routing in laravel 4

Question

I have a section called as reports and under this there are around 40-50 reports.

For each report i need to define a separate class/controller.

I have created a reports folder under controllers and added a ReportsController class under it. My routes route to this ReportsController's add method and based upon the parameter passed it call's the different report class (like ContainerReportController) add method.

Example code:

controllers/reports/ReportController.php

    class ReportController extends BaseController {
     public function add($type)
     {
        $controller = Str::studly($type) . 'Controller';
        return $controller::add();
     }
    }


controllers/reports/ContainerReportController.php

    class ContainerController extends BaseController {
     public function add()
     {
         return "Report will be added here and redirected to main page".
     }
    }

I did it this way because it will not be possible for me to define routes to each of this different types of reports (like ContainerReportController), i defined a single route to the main RportController and from there i call different controllers.

I want to know if i am doing it in right way or if i can have something else which can help me better my code.

FYI - I run composer dump-autoload after adding each Reports in controller/report directory so that the report class is autoloaded while the application runs.

Please help improve this coding.

Thanks, Nikhil

Answer 1

I think your code is not bad, but here's some improvements:

So you have a route:

Route::get('report/{type}', 'ReportsController@report');

A report controller which will instantiate your report and not use it statically, this is testable:

class ReportsController extends BaseController {

    public function report($type)
    {
        $report = Str::studly($type) . 'Report';

        return with(new $report)->add();
    }

}

Many report classes extending a BaseReport class.

This is not a controller because controllers should not talk to each other. A controller basically receives a request pass it to a service class or a model, get the procesed data and send it to a view.

class ContainerReport extends BaseReport {

    public function add()
    {
        $this->reportData = "Report will be added here and redirected to main page".

        return $this->render();
    }

}

And a BaseReport class, which will be extended by all report classes, to do the common things your reports will surely do:

abstract class BaseReport {

    protected $reportData;

    public function render()
    {
        return $this->reportData;
    }

}