Jump Gate

Auto View Resolution

Introduction

The view resolver package aims to add logic that finds a blade or Vue component location automatically for you based on the controller action that was called. We use prefixes, the controller and the action to do this but allow other ways to override this at any time.

This also works for inertia by default. All GET methods should use the response($data, $page) method. This method is found in the BaseController. If you want to switch, look at the switching between blade and vue doc.

{info} It expects blade files to be in /resources/views/ and inertia files to be in /resources/js/Pages/.

Set Up

To start using this package all you have to do is add the JumpGate\ViewResolution\Traits\AutoResolvesViews trait to your controller and use it. This is already added to App\Http\Controllers\BaseController.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Bus\DispatchesJobs;
use Illuminate\Routing\Controller as BaseController;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Validation\ValidatesRequests;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\Access\AuthorizesRequests;
use JumpGate\ViewResolution\Traits\AutoResolvesViews;

class Controller extends BaseController
{
    use AuthorizesRequests, DispatchesJobs, ValidatesRequests, AutoResolvesViews;
}

Next, in any method on the controller call return $this->response() to start the auto resolver. By default this uses the $this->inertia() method to load up inertia pages.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Bus\DispatchesJobs;
use Illuminate\Routing\Controller as BaseController;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Validation\ValidatesRequests;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\Access\AuthorizesRequests;
use JumpGate\ViewResolution\Traits\AutoResolvesViews;

class Controller extends BaseController
{
    use AuthorizesRequests, DispatchesJobs, ValidatesRequests, AutoResolvesViews;

    public function welcome()
    {
        return $this->response();
    }
}

{primary} If you use the specific view() method you do not actually have to use return. This method will work without it, but we prefer all controller methods to actually return something. It removes some of the ‘magic’. Also, the inertia() and response() methods requires the return.

How It Works

When the controller loads, it calls ViewResolution() or inertiaResolution() and begins the process of figuring out what layout and view or vue component to use.

Layouts

This package uses layouts to handle the view resolution. A layout must always be used to add a view into. The package expects two layouts to exist (they can be the same file). A default layout used for standard requests and an ajax layout used for ajax requests. There are a few ways the package gives you to determine which layout to use.

  1. In config/jumpgate/view-resolution.php there is a load_layout option. If this is true the default layout included with the package will be used for both default and ajax requests..
    1. Optionally, you can publish the config and change the values in layout_options and the package will use views instead.
  2. When calling $this->view(); in your controller, you can specify a layout as the second parameter. The layout provided will be used in both default and ajax calls.
  3. In a controller method (normally a __construct) you can call $this->setViewLayout('layout');.
  4. On any controller you can define a set of layout options to tell the package what to use. An example is given below.
protected $layoutOptions = [
    'default' => 'layouts.default',
    'ajax'    => 'layouts.ajax',
];

{info} Layouts are only used for blade files and the view() method.

File Discovery

The view is determined by a number of factors. The controller, the action and the prefix. Assuming that no prefixes are used, the view will be controller.action. (ex: HomeController@index would become home.index).

The methods strip Controller from the controller name and any HTTP verb from the beginning of the action name (get, post, put, etc.).

If you are using prefixes, the methods will concat all the prefixes into a single dot notation string. It will then remove the controller name from the prefix if it finds it. (ie: If you have a prefix as admin.user and the controller is UserController, it will remove user from the prefix).

{primary} The controller name is only removed if it was the last prefix.

If no view is found using the prefix, it will drop off one part of the dot notation at a time trying to find a valid view.
So if your prefix was admin.user.dashboard and your view was in views/admin/user it would still find it since it would drop dashboard after it didn’t find an existing view.

Route::group(['prefix' => 'admin'], function () {
    Route::group(['prefix' => 'home'], function () {
        Route::group(['prefix' => 'dashboard'], function () {
            Route::get('/', [
                'as'   => 'admin.home.index',
                'uses' => 'HomeController@index'
            ]);
        });
    });
});

In the above example, the package would look for a view at views/admin/home/dashboard/index.blade.php. When it doesn’t find one there, it will look at views/admin/home/index.blade.php. Since the controller name matched the last prefix, it skipped looking in views/admin/home/home/index.blade.php.

If no view was found there, it would have looked for one last view in views/home/index.blade.php. If none is found there, it will throw a ViewNotFound exception.

Alternately, for the inertia version, it will capitalize the path parts. So in the above example it would check for a file at resources/js/Pages/Admin/Home/Dashboard/Index.vue then resources/js/Pages/Admin/Home/Index.vue.

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