AutoResponds

Opinionated response discovery for Laravel.

About

Rather than specifically return views or objects from each of your controller methods, the AutoResponds trait determines and automatically creates responses based on the route, controller, and desired response format. In most cases, this means your controller methods become query-only.

Importantly, however, returns from controller methods are handled the same way they would be natively (mostly), so if granular control is needed, you can have that too.

Caveats

• you have to return the correct namespace in the controllerRootNamespace() function of your controller. We provide the correct default, but you may have to change it, depending on your configuration. Laravel does not seem to provide access to this parameter.
• this only works for controller-based routes.

Installation

• Require the silvertipsoftware/auto-responds package in your composer.json and update your dependencies:

$ composer require silvertipsoftware/auto-responds

• Add use AutoResponds in your base Controller, or anywhere you want it.

• If you're using a non-standard setup, implement controllerRootNamespace() in the same controller.

View-Based Responses and Naming

By default, views are discovered based on the controller action being called, and prefixed by any intermediate namespaces. For example, for HTML format, based on the default root controller namespace:

Controller Action...	...Maps to view
UsersController@show	users.show
AccountsController@index	accounts.index
Admin\InvitesController@new	admin.invites.new

If you're using Javascript request/response (eg. UJS, or some other on-the-fly-js library):

Controller Action...	...Maps to view
UsersController@edit	users.js.edit
AccountsController@update	accounts.js.update
Admin\InvitesController@new	admin.invites.js.new

Using the Route Name

If you prefer, view names can be based off of the route name (defined using 'as' in your routes file, for example). To your base controller, add:

    protected $useActionForViewName = false;

Now a route named users.index will map to a view called users.index (or users.js.index for the JS format).

Overriding Detection

In some cases, you may want to use a specific view for a specific action. In that case, set the viewNameForResponse property in your action. For example:

    public function index($request) {
        if (!\Auth::user()) {
            $this->viewNameForResponse = 'need_to_login';
        }
    }

You may also return any standard response from Laravel, from strings, to views, to model instances. The AutoResponds functionality is bypassed in these cases.

The exception is for Javascript formats, where a specific view response is used. By default, AutoResponds looks for a view called js_redirect, and passes it the target location for the redirect as a redirectToUrl variable. Typically, this just looks like:

window.location.href = '{{ $redirectToUrl }}';

but you're free to do whatever you need to.

Format-Specific Notes

Javascript

Javascript responses are all automatically wrapped as a Immediately Invoked Function Expression (or Self Executing Anonymous Function) to encapsulate variables, etc. Your js views do not need to include this.

JSON