Proper way to make a dynamic navigation in Laravel 5

Question

I'm building my first Laravel application using 5.1, it's an ecommerce site.

I've started by creating the "static" pages. I quote because the pages are not dynamically generated from product lists etc, but the html is still retrieved from the database.

I've created a PagesController, a Page model, the pages/index.blade.php and pages/show.blade.php views, as well as a MasterTemplate.blade.php template file.

My routes.php looks like:

$router->get('/', [
    'uses' => 'PagesController@index',
    'as' => 'pages.index'
]);

$router->get('/{page}', [
    'uses' => 'PagesController@show',
    'as' => 'pages.show'
]);

This works fine, I can view my index and individual pages that are in the DB.

My problem occurs when I go to add my navigation. Since I plan on using two different navigation bars (one for user, one for admins), I opted to create a _navDefault.php file to include in the MasterTemplate.

Stripping out the excess html it looks like:

@foreach ($pages as $page)
    <li>{!! link_to_route('pages.show', $page->title, [$page->slug]) !!}</li>
@endforeach

This generates the links just fine and they work. But because my PagesController:

...
public function index()
{
    $pages = $this->page->get();
    return view('pages.index', compact('pages'));
}
...

$pages only exists on the index view, and so navigating to a show view gives me an error that $pages is undefined, which makes perfect sense.

I could define $pages in the show method, but I will also have other controllers such as ProductController and CartController that will have their own pages I will need in the navigation bar, and I can't very well include $pages, $products, and $cart in every index and show method for each controller.

I'm still fairly new to MVC so I'm not sure of the best way to handle this, with a nav controller/model or something else.

What is the proper way to achieve dynamic navigation bars using multiple controllers?

Answer 1

This is how I'm able to have my dynamic navbar everywhere in my app.

Test the following within the boot method of the AppServiceProvider:

View::composer('*', function($view)
{
    $view->with('pages', Page::all());
});

The * means all views will receive $pages.

You can now extract it to a Service Provider dedicated to view composers.

Answer 2

If I understood your question right, you need to create a partial view for your navigation and use a view composer to make sure that partial view has the proper data.

docs