Generating RESTful responses with Laravel 4 - php

Question

I'm building an application with AngularJS that talks to a REST API developed in Laravel 4.
I've made a good start so far by having each request send the relevant Access-Control headers that allow Angular to talk to the API, and I've also built a UserController resource:
Route::resource('users', 'UserController');
However now I seem to be facing a wall. For the learning opportunities, I'd like to build this REST API properly using good standards, and I'm trying to work out how to do the responses.
I know I want to return JSON from the API and as far as I know I should wrap every response in a data field, and I also realize I can do that using something like this at the bottom of my controller actions:
return Response::json(array(
'data' => array(
'users' => array(
array(
'username' => 'Bob',
'email' => 'bob#gmail.com'
)
)
),
'status' => 200,
'success' => true
),
200
);
However, I don't want to repeat that kind of logic in every controller action in my application, so I'm wondering how I can make that code more DRY so that at the end of my controller I can just do something like this:
return array(
'users' => array(
array(
'username' => 'Bob',
'email' => 'bob#gmail.com'
)
)
);
and somewhere else in my application I can do the Response::json stuff. Any ideas?

Answer 1

So like you said, you want to return a JSON response, for example:
return Response::json(
array(
'status' => 'success',
'pages' => $modelData->toArray()
),
200
);
So, instead of repeating this everytime, you could just make a createResponse...() function, perhaps in a base controller class, that you can call in all your controllers. A response failed function could look something like:
function createResponseFailed() {
return Response::json([
'error' => [
'message' => 'Some failed message'
]
], 404);
}
That is just a simple example, but illustrates the point. Hope it helps!