Using Collection pad()

When I’ve got some time I like to read Helpers and Collections in the laravel docs.

Partly because I’m a geek and partly because it seems like sometimes I don’t get it until I have a use case.

Recently I wanted to render a calendar. I found a use for two new methods times() which skips the need for collecting a range and pad() to continue rendering elements in a blade loop even when empty.

In this first example pad let me create empty days for the start of the month (based on the day of week a month starts)...

// Carbon $date
$startDay = (int) $date->firstOfMonth()->isoFormat('d');
$daysWithOffset = $date->daysInMonth + $startDay;
        
$days = Collection::times($date->daysInMonth, fn($day) => match(true) {

    // do stuff… the $day variable is the index starting at 1
    
})->pad("-$daysWithOffset", null);

And that was great in the loop, until there were not enough days to complete the last week (row) in the table. Also remember some months span 6 weeks! pad() let me declare 7 elements even when there were only 3 days in the last week of the month.

@foreach($days->chunk(7) as $week)
    <tr>
        @foreach($week->pad(7, null) as $day)
            <td class="border border-slate-200">
              
              {{-- doing more cool stuff --}}
            
            </td>
        @endforeach
    </tr>
@endforeach

I wonder how you use pad or what are your favorite helper/collection methods and what do you use them for?

jlrdw

3 years ago

Level 75

Thanks for the tip, what calendar app is that?

1 like

webrobert

3 years ago

Level 51

@jlrdw the calendar shown is the result of my code. The app is for an emulation of Basecamp. I decided to write it for personal use and for practice.

The calendar is essentially a sub navigation to show events related to todo items with due dates. You click the day and it shows the events for that day (Livewire). The day will also show an indicator when it has events.

MichalOravec

3 years ago

Level 75

I wonder why you wrote:

fn () => match(true) {
    // 
}

instead of:

function () {
    //
}

1 like

webrobert

3 years ago

Level 51

@MichalOravec,

I could have removed it for the example. I’ve been playing a lot with match. I like it. I made some comments about using it inside a when() for filters. Here there is nothing special. I just haven’t refactored. There were three cases before I used pad.

I like the arrow syntax too and not having to use use

$days = Collection::times($date->daysInMonth, fn($day) => match(true) {
    $day == 1 => Carbon::parse($date->toDateString()),
    default => Carbon::parse($date->addDay()->toDateString()),
})->pad("-$daysWithOffset", null);

I also suspect I could do some refactoring on the Carbon use. But the code does work.

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