Best Practices for Custom Helpers in Laravel 5

Question

I would like to create helper functions to avoid repeating code between views in Laravel 5:

view.blade.php

Foo Formated text: {{ fo         


        

Answer 1

Create custom helpers’ directory: First create Helpers directory in app directory. Create hlper class definition: Let’s now create a simple helper function that will concatenate two strings. Create a new file MyFuncs.php in /app/Helpers/MyFuncs.php Add the following code

namespace App\Helpers; defines the Helpers namespace under App namespace. class MyFuncs {…} defines the helper class MyFuncs. public static function full_name($first_name,$last_name) {…} defines a static function that accepts two string parameters and returns a concatenated string

Helpers service provide class

Service providers are used to auto load classes. We will need to define a service provider that will load all of our helper classes in /app/Helpers directory.

Run the following artisan command:

php artisan make:provider HelperServiceProvider

The file will be created in /app/Providers/HelperServiceProvider.php

Open /app/Providers/HelperServiceProvider.php

Add the following code:

HERE,

namespace App\Providers; defines the namespace provider
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider; imports the ServiceProvider class namespace
class HelperServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider {…} defines a class HelperServiceProvider that extends the ServiceProvider class
public function boot(){…} bootstraps the application service
public function register(){…} is the function that loads the helpers
foreach (glob(app_path().'/Helpers/*.php') as $filename){…} loops through all the files in /app/Helpers directory and loads them.

We now need to register the HelperServiceProvider and create an alias for our helpers.

Open /config/app.php file

Locate the providers array variable

Add the following line

App\Providers\HelperServiceProvider::class,

Locate the aliases array variable

Add the following line

'MyFuncs' => App\Helpers\MyFuncs::class,

Save the changes Using our custom helper

We will create a route that will call our custom helper function Open /app/routes.php

Add the following route definition

Route::get('/func', function () {
    return MyFuncs::full_name("John","Doe");
});

HERE,

return MyFuncs::full_name("John","Doe"); calls the static function full_name in MyFuncs class