Laravel View Composers

An intuitive abstraction for organizing Laravel View Composers and View Creators.

View Composers in Laravel improve application structure by consolidating the controller-independent data-binding logic for a view.

This package provides a readable boilerplate framework to easily define the View Composer and View Creator bindings in your Laravel application.

Compatible with Laravel 4 and 5+. For more information about View Composers and View Creators, see the Laravel Documentation.

Simple Example

In the following example, the application will use MyViewComposer to compose myview, UserComposer to compose the user.profile and user.image views, and both UserComposer and FavoritesComposer to compose the user.favorites view.

class ViewComposerServiceProvider extends ViewBinderServiceProvider
{
    protected function bindViews()
    {
        $this->compose('myview')->with('MyViewComposer');
    }

    protected function bindUserViews()
    {
        $this->setPrefix('user')
            ->compose('profile', 'image')->with('UserComposer')
            ->compose('favorites')->with('UserComposer', 'FavoritesComposer');
    }

    // ...and so on!
}

Installation

Simply install via composer:

$ composer require monospice/laravel-view-composers

Create the Service Provider

The Service Provider takes care of the view binding work when the application boots. Simply extend the Service Provider in this package:

use Monospice\LaravelViewComposers\ViewBinderServiceProvider;

class ViewComposerServiceProvider extends ViewBinderServiceProvider
{
    // View Composer and View Creator bindings will go here
}

And don't forget to add the new Service Provider to app.config:

...
    // Laravel >= 5.1:
    App\Providers\ViewComposerServiceProvider::class,
    // Laravel < 5.1:
    'App\Providers\ViewComposerServiceProvider',
...

No need to declare the register() or boot() methods. The package's service provider takes care of this.

Binding Views

Define View Composer and View Creator bindings in the Service Provider you created during installation.

Definitions must be placed inside a method that begins with "bind" and ends with "Views", such as bindViews() or bindAnythingGoesHereViews(). This convention encourages readable groups of related view bindings:

class ViewComposerServiceProvider extends ViewBinderServiceProvider
{
    protected function bindCommentViews()
    {
        // all comment-related view bindings go here
    }
}

Namespaces

To make these definitions more concise, use the setNamespace() method to declare the namespace to use for the following View Composer or View Creator classes.

...
    protected function bindCommentViews()
    {
        // The hard way
        $this->compose('view')->with('App\Http\ViewComposers\CommentComposer');

        // or just:
        $this->setNamespace('App\Http\ViewComposers')
            ->compose('view2')->with('CommentComposer')
            ->compose('view3')->with('AnotherComposer');
    }
...

In the example above, the Service Provider applies the App\Http\ViewComposers namespace to both the CommentComposer and the AnotherComposer classes.

One may change the namespace at any time by calling setNamespace() again. Any namespaces are automatically cleared at the end of each bindViews() method.

View Prefixes

Similar to namespaces above, one may set the namespace-like prefix of the bound views by calling setPrefix() for more concise code:

...
    protected function bindNavbarViews()
    {
        // The hard way
        $this->compose('partials.navbar.info.user')->with('NavbarComposer');

        // or just:
        $this->setPrefix('partials.navbar.info')
            ->compose('user', 'company')->with('NavbarComposer');
    }
...

As demonstrated, the application binds the partials.navbar.info.user and partials.navbar.info.company views to the NavbarComposer.

One may change the prefix at any time by calling setPrefix() again. Any prefixes are automatically cleared at the end of each bindViews() method.

View Composers

Use the compose() method to specify the views that the application should bind to a particular View Composer, and with() to specify which View Composer to use. The View Composer specified in with() may be a class name or an anonymous function, as described in the Laravel Docs:

...
    protected function bindProductViews()
    {
        $this->setNamespace('App\Http\ViewComposers')->setPrefix('product');

        $this
            ->compose('index', 'search')->with('ProductComposer')
            ->compose('show')->with(function ($view) {
                // view composer logic here
            });
    }
...

View Creators

Similar to View Composers, use the create() method to specify the views that the application should bind to a particular View Creator.

...
    protected function bindStudentViews()
    {
        $this->setNamespace('App\Http\ViewCreators')->setPrefix('dashboard');

        $this
            ->create('student', 'teacher')->with('DashboardCreator')
            ->create('feed')->with(function ($view) {
                // view creater logic here
            });
    }
...

Testing

The Laravel View Composers package uses PHPSpec to test object behavior:

$ vendor/bin/phpspec run

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see the LICENSE File for more information.