Introducing the when helper 0:00Hey everyone, how you doing? So Laravel has had a lot of new features added to the framework, and we've talked about some of those. Jeffrey talked about the chaperone method on Eloquent models. He talked about the defer function. I talked about flexibleCache. But today we are going to talk about the when function. So I have an Employee bio page, it has the name, and then a bio that doesn't exist. But some employees have awards, and I want to display not only the award that they have, but also a title that says, you know, awardWinner, and then it has the awards that they. Traditional conditional title 0:39But some employees have awards, and I want to display not only the award that they have, but also a title that says, you know, awardWinner, and then it has the awards that they have won. And we can easily do that. Let's first of all start with a title variable, and we will initialize it as an empty string. Then we will check if the User has an Award, and if so, then we will set a value for our title variable, and it will just be awardWinner. And then we will need to include that title whenever we pass data to the view. But for the most part, that's it. It's a very common pattern.But for the most part, that's it. It's a very common pattern. We'll initialize a variable, preferably with a default value, and then modify that variable if a condition is true. But of course, we need to display that information. So inside of our show view, let's do this. We will have an if directive, and we will check if we have a title. And if so, we don't need a lot of CSS here. So we'll just have some italic text. We will output the title, and then the employee's awards.So we'll just have some italic text. We will output the title, and then the employee's awards. And that'll be it. We want to close out that if directive. And whenever we refresh the page, we see award winner, salesman of the year. And that's great. That works. As I said, that is a very common pattern. It's almost so common that whenever we start to see even something as simple as the initialization and then an if statement, we know what's going to happen. Simplifying with when 2:04It's almost so common that whenever we start to see even something as simple as the initialization and then an if statement, we know what's going to happen. But we can simplify this, and we can actually write code that is very descriptive as to what we are doing here. So we're going to go ahead and create our title variable. But we're going to call this new function called win. We provide a condition, and then when it's true, we specify the value that we want the win function to return. So it reads very well, very explicitly, when we have an award, which that should be userAward.So it reads very well, very explicitly, when we have an Award, which that should be UserAward. When we have an Award, then return AwardWinner. So whenever we view this in the browser and refresh, we see the same result as we had before. Because, well, it is exactly the same thing, except that now we have simplified four lines of code into one, and it reads very, well, very well. It tells us exactly what's going on. And I dare say that the win function is probably going to be used the most inside of a view. For example, not only do I have an individual page for our employees, but I have an employee Highlighting award winners 3:10And I dare say that the win function is probably going to be used the most inside of a view. For example, not only do I have an individual page for our employees, but I have an employee list. And I want the names of award winners to be, well, at least noticeable. Because by looking at this list, we have no idea who has won an award. We know Kenatorophy has, because, well, that's what we were looking at before. But who else does? So inside of our index view, here I am iterating over our employees. We could do something like this. We could have a ternary expression.We could do something like this. We could have a ternary expression. So that's we will check if the user has an award. If so, then we will return text-yellow-500. Otherwise, we will return an empty string. Again, I would say that this is very common, but it's also very verbose. And the only reason why we can look at this and we can know almost exactly what's going on is because of practice. We've had to write this. We've had to read this.We've had to write this. We've had to read this. This has really been the option of conditional output. But it is what it is. Whenever we view it in the browser, we can see, well, something doesn't work quite right. And it's got to be because I have an extra curly brace there. So now whenever we refresh, we can see, well, we have two employees that have awards. Kenatorophy, we of course know. And then Maynard Mowen, he is the employee of the month. But of course, that's not the only way that we can approach this.And then Maynard Mowen, he is the employee of the month. But of course, that's not the only way that we can approach this. I mean, yes, this is probably the most common, but we could do something like this. We could have an if directive. If the user has an award, then we want to output text-yellow-500, and then we need to close out that if directive. And personally, I do not like this approach just because I don't like using an if directive inside of an HTML attribute. But we can see that we end up with the same result. But again, I definitely don't like this.But we can see that we end up with the same result. But again, I definitely don't like this. And truth be told, I don't like using the ternary operator as well. But now that we have the when function, we can essentially do the same thing by checking. I keep wanting to use this, and I don't know why. If the User has an award, then we will output text-yellow-500. And now as we are reading our code, we can know without a doubt what's going on. When the User has an award, output text-yellow-500. And that's going to give us the exact same result as we had before, except that now our code is, well, much more readable, at least in my opinion. when helper recap 5:45And that's going to give us the exact same result as we had before, except that now our code is, well, much more readable, at least in my opinion. So the when helper function is very simple and straightforward. It accepts two arguments. The first argument is the condition. The second argument is the value that you want to return when that condition is true. If the condition is false, it returns null. And in most cases, we can just ignore it. So just like all of the other features that we've talked about, update your project so that you can take advantage of the when helper function today.So just like all of the other features that we've talked about, update your project so that you can take advantage of the when helper function today.
