How to do restful ajax routes to methods in Laravel 5? - php

Question

So I have a route that looks like this:
Route::any('some/page', ['as' => 'some-page', 'uses' => 'SomePageController#index']);
However, I also have ajax calls at the same URL (using a request parameter called ajax like: some/page/?ajax=my_action) that I want to hit methods on my controller:
index already routes: 'SomePageController#index'
ajax = my_action needs to route: 'SomePageController#ajaxMyAction'
ajax = my_other_action needs to route: 'SomePageController#ajaxMyOtherAction'
ajax = blah_blah needs to route: 'SomePageController#ajaxBlahBlah
...
What's the elegant solution to setting this up in my routes.php file?

Answer 1

After inspection of Laravel's Http Request and Route classes, I found the route() and setAction() methods could be useful.
So I created a middleware to handle this:
<?php namespace App\Http\Middleware;
class Ajax {
public function handle($request, Closure $next)
{
// Looks for the value of request parameter called "ajax"
// to determine controller's method call
if ($request->ajax()) {
$routeAction = $request->route()->getAction();
$ajaxValue = studly_case($request->input("ajax"));
$routeAction['uses'] = str_replace("#index", "#ajax".$ajaxValue, $routeAction['uses']);
$routeAction['controller'] = str_replace("#index", "#ajax".$ajaxValue, $routeAction['controller']);
$request->route()->setAction($routeAction);
}
return $next($request);
}
}
Now my route looks like:
Route::any('some/page/', ['as' => 'some-page', 'middleware'=>'ajax', 'uses' => 'SomePageController#index']);
And correctly hits my controller methods (without disturbing Laravel's normal flow):
<?php namespace App\Http\Controllers;
class SomePageController extends Controller {
public function index()
{
return view('some.page.index');
}
public function ajaxMyAction(Requests\SomeFormRequest $request){
die('Do my action here!');
}
public function ajaxMyOtherAction(Requests\SomeFormRequest $request){
die('Do my other action here!');
}
...
I think this is a fairly clean solution.

Answer 2

You can't make this dispatch in the routing layer if you keep the same URL. You have two options :
Use different routes for your AJAX calls. For example, you can prefix all your ajax calls by /api. This is a common way :
Route::group(['prefix' => 'api'], function()
{
Route::get('items', function()
{
//
});
});
If the only different thing is your response format. You can use a condition in your controller. Laravel provides methods for that, for example :
public function index()
{
$items = ...;
if (Request::ajax()) {
return Response::json($items);
} else {
return View::make('items.index');
}
}
You can read this http://laravel.com/api/5.0/Illuminate/Http/Request.html#method_ajax and this http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/routing#route-groups if you want more details.