Blueprint | Controller Shorthands

Controller Shorthands

In addition to some of the statement shorthands and model reference conveniences, Blueprint also offers shorthands for generating resource and invokable controllers.

Resource Shorthand

This aligns with Laravel‘s preference for creating resource controllers.

Instead of having to write out all of the actions and statements common to CRUD behavior within your controllers, you may instead use the resource shorthand.

The resource shorthand automatically infers the model reference based on the controller name. Blueprint will expand this into the 7 resource actions with the appropriate statements for each action: index, create, store, show, edit, update, and destroy.

For example, the following represents the longhand definition of resource controller:

controllers:
  Post:
    index:
      query: all:posts
      render: post.index with:posts
    create:
      render: post.create
    store:
      validate: post
      save: post
      flash: post.id
      redirect: post.index
    show:
      render: post.show with:post
    edit:
      render: post.edit with:post
    update:
      validate: post
      update: post
      flash: post.id
      redirect: post.index
    destroy:
      delete: post
      redirect: post.index

Instead, you may generate the equivalent by simply writing resource.

controllers:
  Post:
    resource

By default, the resource shorthand generates the 7 web resource actions. Of course, you are welcome to set this explicitly as resource: web.

Blueprint doesn’t stop there. You may also specify a value of api. A value of api would generate the 5 resource actions of an API controller with the appropriate statements and responses for each action: index, store, show, update, and destroy.

You may also specify the exact controller actions you wish to generate by specifying any of the 7 resource actions as a comma separated list. If you wish to use the API actions, prefix the action with api..

The following examples demonstrates which methods would be generated for each of the shorthands.

# generate only index and show actions
resource: index, show

# generate only store and update API actions
resource: api.store, api.update

# generate "web" index and API destroy actions
resource: index, api.destroy

While you may use this shorthand to generate these controller actions quickly, and update the code after, you may also combine the resource shorthand with any additional actions or even override the defaults.

The following example demonstrates the definition for controller which will generate the all 7 resource actions, plus a download action, and will use the defined statements for the show action instead of the shorthand defaults.

controllers:
  Post:
    resource: all
    download:
      find: post.id
      respond: post
    show:
      query: comments where:post.id
      render: post.show with:post,comments

Invokable Shorthand

You may also use Blueprint to generate single action controllers, using the invokable shorthand:

controllers:
  Report:
    invokable

The above draft is equivalent to explicitly defining an __invoke action which renders a view with the same name as the controller:

controllers:
  Report:
    __invoke:
      render: report

For convenience, you may also define an invokable action instead of having to remember the underlying __invoke syntax:

controllers:
  Report:
    invokable:
      fire: ReportGenerated
      render: report

All of the above draft files would generate the following route for an invokable controller:

Route::get('/report', App\Http\Controllers\ReportController::class);