Are View Composers only for Static Queries?

View composers are used when the same data needs to be shared across multiple view files. Technically speaking, it can be dynamic or static data, however as far as I am aware, you cannot pass parameters to change the results, as these are setup in ServiceProviders.

For example (using this from a Laracasts video lesson): Imagine you have a navbar, and you want to show the title of the latest blog post.

The problem: In order for the navbar to receive the latest blog post, you would need to pass that blog post to every view that is rendered that includes the navbar, which in 99% of cases, would be every view. So for every method in your controller, you would do something like this:

// stuff that relates to this method

$latestPost = Post::latest()->first();

return view('my.view', compact('latestPost'));

Solution: Use a view composer to pass the $latestPost variable to the view that contains the navbar (e.g: app.blade.php or navbar.blade.php) so that the navbar has access to it

I would use view composers for partial views which are reused in many different places but all require some data from somewhere e.g. a menu view which requires always requires data from a database to build itself.

You can use the router from inside a view composer to access information about the current route:

https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/routing#accessing-the-current-route

https://laravel.com/api/5.8/Illuminate/Routing/Router.html

@DARKROAST - Brilliant! That's exactly what I needed.

 $params = Route::current()->originalParameters();
        // Dependencies automatically resolved by service container...
        //$this->users = $users;
        $studentsEnrolled = Enrollment::totalStudentsEnrolled($params['course']);
        $this->studentsEnrolled = $studentsEnrolled;

One thing for anyone looking this up after the fact. If you create a Service Provider for your view composers, be sure to execute: php artisan config:clear and php artisan clear-compiled Laravel did not recognize my service provider until after. Hopefully that will save someone some time!

Thank you.