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Controllers 85
it would make sense to group this logic together. This is why the logic is contained in one single
ArticleController.
In honesty, you can call the Controller whatever you like. As long as your controller extends
either BaseController or Controller then Laravel will know what you are trying to do. However,
suffixing a controllers name with Controller, for example ArticleController is somewhat of a
standard that web developers employ. If you plan to be working with others, then standards can be
extremely useful.
Our controller has been created in the app/controllers directory which Laravel has created for us.
This directory is being ‘classmap file loaded’ from our composer.json by default. If app/controllers
doesn’t suit your workflow, then you can put the file wherever you like. However, you must make
sure that the class can be autoloaded by Composer. For more information on this topic, please refer
back to the Composer primer.
The class methods of our Controller are what actually contain our logic. Once again you can name
them however you like, but personally I like to use the word ’show’ as a prefix if the result is that
they display a web page. These methods must be public for Laravel to be able to route to them. You
can add additional private methods to the class for abstraction, but they cannot be routed to. In fact,
there’s a better place for that kind of code which we will learn about in the models chapter.
Let’s have a closer look at our first action, which in this example would be used to display a blog
article listing.
1 public function showIndex()
2 {
3 return View::make('index');
4 }
Hmm, doesn’t that look awfully familiar? Let’s quickly compare it to a routed closure that could be
used to achieve the same effect.
1 Route::get('index', function()
2 {
3 return View::make('index');
4 });
As you can see, the inner function is almost identical. The only difference is that the controller action
has a name, and the closure is anonymous. In fact, the controller action can contain any code that
the Closure can. This means that everything we have learned so far is still applicable. Shame, if it
was different I could have sold another book on controllers!
There is one other difference between the two snippets however. In the basic routing chapter we were
taught how to route a URI to a piece of logic contained within a Closure. In the above routed closure
example the URI /index would be routed to our application logic. However, our Controller action
doesn’t mention a URI at all. How does Laravel know how to direct it’s routes to our controller?
Let’s take a look at Controller routing and hope we find an answer to our question.