Using Controllers #

Controllers are simply classes that serve as bridges between Models and the View part of your application. Don't think too much of controllers, they're nothing but a class.

In this section, we'll be looking at how to handle a route with a controller. So let's make an example controller: remember it's just a php class

<?php
class HomeController {
  public function index() {
    echo "This is the index function";
  }
}

To handle a route using this controller, we'll have to import the controller, and then define a simple route

require "HomeController.php";

// we leave out the second parameter for now
app()->get("/home");

$app = new Leaf\App;

require "HomeController.php";

// we leave out the second parameter for now
$app->get("/home");

When using controllers, instead of defining a closure or function as the second parameter of your route, you rather pass in a string of the controller's class name and the function you want to use. In this case, "HomeController@index", so remember, it's Class@Method

require "HomeController.php";

app()->get("/home", "HomeController@index");

$app = new Leaf\App;

require "HomeController.php";

$app->get("/home", "HomeController@index");

Controller Namespaces #

In case you're using an auto loader or using leaf in another framework and you have your controllers in another directory, you can do sommething like this

app()->get('/(\d+)', '\App\Controllers\User@showProfile');

$app->get('/(\d+)', '\App\Controllers\User@showProfile');

But this gets tedious if you have a lot of routes. So Leaf allows you to set a "general" namespace, you can set the default namespace to use on your router instance via setNamespace()

app()->setNamespace('\App\Controllers');

app()->get('/users/(\d+)', 'User@showProfile');
app()->get('/cars/(\d+)', 'Car@showProfile');

$app->setNamespace('\App\Controllers');

$app->get('/users/(\d+)', 'User@showProfile');
$app->get('/cars/(\d+)', 'Car@showProfile');

Resource Controller #

Resource Controllers contain methods to handle CRUD functionality.

<?php

use Leaf\Controller;
use Leaf\Http\Request;

class ClassName extends Controller {
    public function __construct() {
        parent::__construct();
        $this->request = new Request;
    }

    /**
     * Display a listing of the resource.
     */
    public function index() {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Show the form for creating a new resource.
     */
    public function create() {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Store a newly created resource in storage.
     */
    public function store() {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Display the specified resource.
     */
    public function show($id) {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Show the form for editing the specified resource.
     */
    public function edit($id) {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Update the specified resource in storage.
     */
    public function update($id) {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Remove the specified resource from storage.
     */
    public function destroy($id) {
        //
    }
}