Where do I put Laravel 4 helper functions that can display flash messages?

Question

I\'ve written a simple display_messages() function that will search Session::get(\'errors\') for flash data and echo it to the screen.

Where do

Answer 1

Thank you memeLab provided a very useful answer which helped me a lot. I just wanted to expand on his answer as the "libraries" folder was not an auto load directory, at least not in the release/current version of L4 I am using. Also the start.php seems to have been expanded to be the start folder with global.php, local.php, and artisan.php.

So to use your own classes for separate libraries or helpers with the L4 lazy auto loader you just have to include whichever folder you want to store these in to the global.php. For example I added a libraries folder to the directory list.

ClassLoader::addDirectories(array(

    app_path().'/commands',
    app_path().'/controllers',
    app_path().'/models',
    app_path().'/database/seeds',
    // this a custom path
    app_path().'/libraries',

));

Then whatever class you define in that folder as classname.php can be called via CLASSNAME::methodName($someVar); in your controllers.

class CLASSNAME {

    public static function methodName($someVar=NULL) {

        // whatever you want to do...

        return $message;
    }

}

So in this fashion you can create a helper class and define different methods to use throughout your controllers. Also be careful defining regular functions outside of your Class in this manner will cause you grief because they will not work (because the class is not always loaded). (for example someFunctionName($someVar); instead of CLASSNAME::methodName($someVar);) If you want to create functions in this manner you would need to make sure the is loaded, however I will not elaborate on this because it is better practice to use the lazy loader classes for such things so you only load the classes you really need.

Thanks again to memeLab and Usman, I would not have gotten as far without their answers. :)