Question about a dashboard controller

Hi.

The best practice to send this to the view is to try to get as many of these properties with scopes or methods on your models I think. This way you can pass through the object to the view and call methods on them within blade to retrieve this information. This keeps your controller nice and clean while keeping the logic related to the model where it should be.

Also, you should set up relationships so that you can retrieve other related objects. This way you limit the data you need to pass in the view to your controller.

Take newest product for example:

On Product Model:

public function category 
{
    return $this->belongsTo(Category::class);
}

public function scopeLatestFirst($query, $categoryId)
{
    return $query->where('category_id', $categoryId)-> orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get();
}

In controller:

public function index()
{
    $products = Product::latestFirst('insert wanted categoryid');

    return view('products.someview', compact('products'));
}

In view:

  @foreach ($products as $product)
  <h1>{{ $product->title }}</h1>
 <h2> {{ $product->category->title }}</h2>
 @endforeach

Hi Khare,

Thanks for your prompt reply. I think I understand what you are doing, but you say "In controller" as a title above the example code. Which controller are you refering to? Is that the new 'dashboardController' or the 'productController'? I think it's the dashboardController. If so, can I then simply do this for other info for example?

public function index()
{
    $products = Product::latestFirst('insert wanted categoryid');
    return view('products.someview', compact('products'));

    $catalogueSize = Product::count('category..');
    return view('products.someview', compact('catalogueSize'));

    $transactions = Transaction::latestFirst();
    return view('products.someview', compact('transactions'));
}

Or am I wrong at this?

I guess this depends on how you have structured your project. I generally like to keep my controllers responsible for one class. So I would have one ProductsController and one TransactionsController (depending on the complexity of the controllers).

So if you want to pass that data to your view in the example you gave I would do it like this:

public function index()
{
    $products = Product::latestFirst($categoryId);
    $transactions = Transaction::latestFirst();
    $catalogueSize = $products->count();

    return view('products.someview, compact('products', 'transactions', 'catalogueSize'));
}

Note that you can access the catalogue size in your view without having to make a new variable in your controller explicitly for that. Just do {{ $products->count() }}

This saves some code in your controller, and you can do this because your scope already limits the products to the categoryId that you pass in, so you would only get the products in that category.

OK, so this is the dashboardController. Thanks. I only need to add some "use App\Product" and "use App\Transaction" at the top of this controller, right?

Yep, that should work.

Just to be sure: I don't need a Dashboard model, do I?

Not unless you have a database tabel named dashboard that you need to manage.

You do however need to do some basic things to get relationships up and going like setting up a foreign key on your database table and setting up the inverse relationship on the category model.

On category model:

use App\Product;

public function products() 
{
    return $this->hasMany(Product::class);
}

on products table:

$table->integer('category_id')->unsigned();
$table->foreign('category_id')->references('id')->on('products');

Now when you create a new instance of product you can reference the relationship and Laravel will automatically associate the product with the category.

@TutanRamon No need.