Laravel 5: Controller Inter-Communication and Instantiation - php

Question

In the past I've used a proprietary framework that kinda followed an Objective-C like View Controller scheme.
Basically I was able to in one controller instantiate another and pass it some values like an array of products and then inject the reference to the controller to my view and render it whenever I wanted by issuing: $controllerReference->render();
This could be useful in many cases, eg. if I had a controller responsible for rendering a catalog, I would just pass it an array with all the items I would like to see and it would take take of pagination and displaying the items by itself...
Example:
At \UI\Homepage\Controller.php (the controller responsible for the homepage):
// Instantiate a ProductDisplay Controller
$controllRef = new \UI\ProductDisplay\Controller();
$controllRef->setProducts( ... ); // Inject the product array
// Load the current view for this controller and pass it a reference for the ProductDisplay controller
$this->loadSelfView(["controllRef" => $controllRef]);
At \UI\Homepage\View.php (the view loaded before):
// some html of the view
$controllRef->render(); // Render the ProductDisplay view here!
// some other html
How should this functionality be accomplished in Laravel? From what I've been reading Laravel tries to avoid this kind of actions, why? What are the workarounds?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Here is how I will do this, it only work if the called controller method return a View object like return view('home');):
// Get the controller class from the IOC container
$myController= \App::make(MyController::class);
// Execute the controller method (which return a View object)
$view = $myController->myControllerMethod($someParams);
// Return the View html content
$html = $view->render();
you can use the Controller.php class which is extended by all other controller to make a generic method in it to:
Get a controller instance
Call the right method with x parameters
Return the rendered content if it's a view class OR throw an exception (for exemple)

Answer 2

In recent versions of Laravel, it's possible to use Blade's #inject directive. It seems its main purpose is to inject services but I successfully injected controller actions.
Here is a snippet on what you have to do:
#inject('productController', 'App\Http\Controllers\ProductController')
{!! $productController->index() !!}
Just remember: since you're calling the controller method directly, and not through the router, you'll have to pass all required params. If that action requires a request instance, you may call it this way:
{!! $productController->index(request()) !!}
Probably the view returned by the called action contains HTML code. It's important to wrap the method call within {!! and !!}. Using regular {{ }} tags will cause the HTML code be escaped by the template engine.