First Laravel Tutorial - Controllers and Routes

Commence quick and helpful tutorial…

Laravel route

Previously on a Laravel project, I had to have a slug within my routes which would point to two different tables within my database. I needed a controller which would do the thinking for me. And by this I mean, in my routes I would have…

Route::get('{slug}', 'URLController@index');

Laravel controller

And in my Controller, I would have the following to do the thinking for me…

public function index($slug)
{
    if(Page::where('slug', $slug)) {
        //Show page property
    }
    else if(Blog::where('slug', $slug)) {
        //Show Blog property
    }
}

So here we have our logic saying if there is anything in the page table where the slug matches. We show the page with that slug otherwise, show a blog post with the matching slug.

This might not be the best example as a lot of people would have a blog post going to ‘blog/{slug}’ and you might even have the page go to ‘page/{slug}’, but the page structure of a site is always changing and it depends on how you feel people should view your site.

I have found one problem with this mind, if nothing gets found then it will just show a blank page, I haven’t found the good logic which will display errors. Or if you are in production a 404 page.

Check out my previous blog post.