Controllers¶

Introduction¶

When a route is matched to the current request, a controller will be called to fulfill the request. This is the fundamental purpose of controllers – to perform any backend logic and send back the output. A basic controller will look something like this:

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Horizon\Http\Controller;
use Horizon\Http\Request;
use Horizon\Http\Response;

class Home extends Controller {

    public function __invoke(Request $request, Response $response) {
        view('home');
    }

}

Registering controllers¶

The only way to register a controller for automatic execution is to assign it to a route from your routing configuration file. To learn more about how that works, see the routing documentation.

Route::get('/', 'App\Http\Controllers\Home');

Parameter binding¶

Like middleware, controller methods do not have any specific parameter requirements. Instead, the framework will use reflection and the service container to bind and provide objects and values for your parameters in your own order. By default, all of the following is available as parameters for middleware.

• The Request and Response instances
• The Route instance
• All request attributes
• All route variables

This means given the following route:

Route::get('/user/{name}/{tab?}');

Any of these method signatures will work, for example:

public function __invoke();
public function __invoke(Request $request);
public function __invoke(Request $request, Response $response);
public function __invoke(Route $route);
public function __invoke(Response $response, $name, $tab = 'profile');

Initialization¶

If you need to execute code for an entire controller, regardless of which method is invoked, you can use the init method. This is called immediately before the controller method and can also bind parameters as specified above.

public function init($userId) {
    $this->user = User::findOrFail($userId);
}

Middleware¶

Controllers can also instruct the framework to execute middleware before its execution, using an overridable method named getMiddleware. This method can return an array of class names or a single class name as a string.

public function getMiddleware() {
    return array(
        'App\Http\Middleware\RunMeFirst'
    );
}