Laravel 5 Basics (11) - Subviews and Form Reuse

We need to deal with editing articles. Of course we can add new routes manually, like this:

<code>Route::get('/articles/{id}/edit', 'ArticleController@edit');</code>

Let’s use artisan’s route:list from the command line to view our current routes:

<code>php artisan route:list</code>

In the case of RESTful compliance, it may be a good choice to directly use laravel's resource route. However, we will remove all routes and only add the only one:

<code>Route::resource('articles', 'ArticlesController');</code>

Use <code>php artisan route:list</code> again to view the routes, wow, a bunch of routes that meet our expectations are generated. Look at each item carefully.

Now add method in controller:

<code>
    public function edit($id) {
        $article = Article::findOrFail($id);

        return view('articles.edit', compact('article'));
    }</code>

Create View Now

<code>@extends('layout')

@section('content')
    <h1>Edit: {!! $article->title !!} </h1>

    <hr/>

    ...</code>

Okay, I admit that these codes are all copied from create.blade.php and modified a bit. The question is do we need to repeat them? We will deal with this issue later, now let’s look at the form submission issue. In the routing <code>php artisan route:list</code>, look again and use the PATCH method. Let’s modify the view:

<code>{!! Form::open(['method' => 'PATCH', 'url' => 'articles/' . $article->id]) !!} </code>

Visit /articles/1/edit in the browser, check the source code, and find that laravel automatically generates the hidden field of _method=PATCH.

The first problem is that we edit the article, but the information of the article is not displayed. Let’s modify the view:

<code> {!! Form::model($article, ['method' => 'PATCH', 'url' => 'articles/' . $article->id]) !!}</code>

OK, everything's ok, except that the published_on field is still set to the current date, we'll deal with that later.

Now add method in controller:

<code>    public function update($id, \Illuminate\Http\Request $request) {
        $article = Article::findOrFail($id);
        $article->update($request->all());

        return redirect('articles');
    }</code>

We also need to verify during the modification process. Let us reuse our Request class and rename CreateArticleRequest to the more general ArticleRequest. Don’t forget to modify the parameters in the store method.

<code>    public function update($id, Requests\ArticleRequest $request) {
        $article = Article::findOrFail($id);
        $article->update($request->all());

        return redirect('articles');
    }</code>

The remaining problem now is that our new and edit use most of the same code, such as displaying errors, but there are two copies of them, let's fix this problem.

We create a new file list.blade.php directly under views/articles, and copy the error handling code from create.blade.php:

<code>@if ($errors->any())
    <ul class="alert alert-danger">
        @foreach($errors->all() as $error)
            <li>{{ $error }}</li>
        @endforeach
    </ul>
@endif</code>

In create.blade.php just replace the error handling code with the following statement:

<code>@include('articles.list')</code>

Let’s deal with the form code again. The form code is almost the same except for form which is different from the submit button. We create a view articles/form_partial.blade.php and copy the code

<code><div class="form-group">
    {!! Form::label('title', 'Title:') !!}
    {!! Form::text('title', null, ['class' => 'form-control']) !!}
</div>

<div class="form-group">
    {!! Form::label('body', 'Body:') !!}
    {!! Form::textarea('body', null, ['class' => 'form-control']) !!}
</div>

<div class="form-group">
    {!! Form::label('published_at', 'Publish On:') !!}
    {!! Form::input('date', 'published_at', date('Y-m-d'), ['class' => 'form-control']) !!}
</div>

<div class="form-group">
    {{--这里要设置变量，依据是编辑还是修改来改变，当然也可以不放置在partial中--}}
    {!! Form::submit($submitButtonText, ['class' => 'btn btn-primary form-control']) !!}
</div></code>

Modify create.blade.php

<code>@extends('layout')

@section('content')
    <h1>Write a New Article</h1>

    <hr/>

    @include('articles.list')

    {{--使用我们添加的 illuminate\html 开源库--}}
    {!! Form::open(['url' => 'articles']) !!}
        @include('articles.form_partial', ['submitButtonText' => 'Add Article'])
    {!! Form::close() !!}

@stop</code>

Modify edit.blade.php

<code>@extends('layout')

@section('content')
    <h1>Edit: {!! $article->title !!} </h1>

    <hr/>

    @include('articles.list')
    {{--使用我们添加的 illuminate\html 开源库--}}
    {!! Form::model($article, ['method' => 'PATCH', 'url' => 'articles/' . $article->id]) !!}
    @include('articles.form_partial', ['submitButtonText' => 'Update Article'])

    {!! Form::close() !!}

@stop</code>

The above has introduced the basics of Laravel 5 (11) - Subview and form reuse, including aspects of it. I hope it will be helpful to friends who are interested in PHP tutorials.