Laravel Widgetize

🎀🎀 "cleaner code" ➕ "easy caching" 🎀🎀

Built with ❤️ for every smart laravel developer

• 🔦 Introduction

  • What is a widget object ?
  • When to use the widget concept?
  • Package Features

• 🔧 Installation

• 🌍 Global Configuration

• 🚙 Per Widget Configuration

  • public $template (optional)
  • public $cacheLifeTime (optional)
  • public $cacheTags (optional)
  • public $cacheView (optional)
  • public $controller (optional) Advanced
  • public $presenter (optional) Advanced
  • public function extraCacheKeyDependency (optional) Advanced
  • public function cacheKey (optional) Advanced

• 💡 Usage and Example

  • How to make a widget class
  • How to use a widget class
  • What is a slot?
  • How to define a slot
  • How to use the slot

More readings:

• Some Theory for Experts

  • Article about widgetize and S in Solid Design Patterns
  • Article about widgetize and O in Solid Design Patterns

• ⭐ Your Stars Makes Us Do More

This page may look long and boring to read at first, but bear with me!!!

I bet if you read through it you won't get disappointed at the end.So let's Go... 🏇

Installation: ⬇️

composer require imanghafoori/laravel-widgetize

🔌 (For Laravel <=5.4) Next, you must add the service provider to config/app.php 🔌

'providers' => [
    // for laravel 5.4 and below
    Imanghafoori\Widgets\WidgetsServiceProvider::class,
];

Publish your config file

php artisan vendor:publish

🔥 And you will be on fire!🔥

php artisan make:widget MySexyWidget

A lot of docs are included in the generated widget file so it is not needed to memorize or even read the rest of this page. You can jump right-in and start using it.

Overview:

This package helps you in:

• Page Partial Caching

• Clean up your Controllers Code

• Minify HTML

• Easily provide page partials for varnish or nginx for ESI caching

• Integrated with laravel-debugbar package

• Renders your widget as HTML or JSON

When to use this package?

This concept (this design pattern) really shines when you want to create tall web pages with multiple sections (on sidebar, menu, carousels ...) and each widget needs separate sql queries and php logic to be provided with data for its template. Anyway installing it has minimal overhead since surprisingly it is just a small abstract class and Of course you can use it to refactor your monster code and tame it into managable pieces or boost the performance 4x-5x times faster! 💫

What is a widget?

You can think of a widget as a blade partial (which know how to provide data for itself.)

You can include @widget('myWidget') within your blade files and it will turn into HTML!!!

So you can replace @include('myPartial') with @widget('myWidget') in our laravel applications.

💎 Technical Features:

🔹 1. It optionally caches the output of each widget. (which give a very powerful, flexible and easy to use caching opportunity) You can set different cache config for each part of the page. Similar to ESI standard.

🔹 2. It optionally minifies the output of the widget.

🔹 3. It shows debug info for your widgets as html title="" attributes.

🔹 4. php artisan make:widget command

🔹 5. It helps you to have a dedicated presenter class of each widget to clean up your views.

🔹 6. It extends the Route facade with Route::jsonWidget , Route::widget

What happens when your write @widget('SomeWidget') in your views

Given that we have disabled caching in the widgetize config file...

1 - It first looks for "SomeWidget" class to get config from.

2 - Then calls the widget's controller method and gets some data from it.

3 - Using that data it "compiles" (in other word "renders") the blade file ($template). (to produce some html)

4 - (If caching is enabled for the widget) it puts a copy of the resulting html in cache, for future use.

5 - At last, it returns the final HTML. (or maybe json)

"Widgets" vs. "View Composers":

You might think that "view composers" are already doing the job, so why "widgets" ?

1- The worst thing about view composers is you never know which composer is attached to a @include not to mention other members of your team.

2- You have no way of passing data to the compose() method from your view. They receive a \Illuminate\View\View object. so they can not be re-used to expose json data. widgetize designed to provide fully freedom and resuability for widget-controllers.

public function compose(View $view)
{
    $view->with('count', $this->users->count());
}

3- They offer no caching out of the box.

💡 Sample Code:

How to generate a widget?

You can use : php artisan make:widget MyWidget to make your widget class.

Sample widget class :

namespace App\Widgets;

class MyWidget
{
    // The data returned here would be available in widget view file automatically.
    public function data($my_param=5)
    {
        // It's the perfect place to query the database for your widget...
        return Product::orderBy('id', 'desc')->take($my_param)->get();

    }
}

App\Widgets\MyWidgetView.blade.php :

<ul>
  @foreach($data as $product)
    <li>
      {{ $product->title }}
    </li>
  @endforeach
  
  Note that it is perfectly ok to use an other widget here 
  @widget('AnOtherWidget')
</ul>

Ok, Now it's done! We have a ready to use widget. let's use it...

Then how to use that widget?

In a normal day to day view (middle-end):

<html>
    <head></head>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello {{ auth()->user()->username }} </h1> <!-- not cached -->

        @widget('RecentProductsWidget') <!-- Here we send request to back-end to get HTML -->
        
    <body>
</html>

An other way to think of @widget() in your blade files :

All of us, more or less have some ajax experience. One scenario is to lazy load a page partial after
the page has been fully loaded.
You can think of @widget() as an ajax call from "middle-end" to the "back-end" to load a piece of HTML
into the page.

What is the slot?

Slots help you position your HTML or blade code in a widget, and allow the parent widget to arrange it, and improves your widget reusability.

How to define a slot?

To use the slot, you should use @slotWidget instead of @widget and close the directive @endSlotWidget, Then define your slot middle of it. Look at the syntax:

@slotWidget('MyWidget')
    @slot('message')
        <h1>Hello {{ auth()->user()->username }} </h1>
    @endSlot
@endSlotWidget

also, you can pass your data:

@slotWidget('MyWidget', [$a, $b])
...

How to use the slot?

App\Widgets\MyWidgetView.blade.php :

<div class="message">
    {!! $slots['message'] !!}
</div>

📖 Documentation:

🌍 Global Config:

You can set the variables in "config/widgetize.php" file to globally set some configs for you widgets and override them per widget if needed. Read the docblocks in config/widgetize.php file for more info.

🚙 Per Widget Config:

public $template (string)

If you do not set it,By default, it refers to app/Widgets folder and looks for the 'widgetNameView.blade.php' (Meaning that if your widget is app/Widgets/home/recentProducts.php the default view for that is app/Widgets/home/recentProductsView.blade.php) Anyway you can override it to point to any partial in views folder.(For example: public $template='home.footer' will look for resource/views/home/footer.blade.php) So the entire widget lives in one folder:

| app\Widgets\Homepage\RecentProductsWidget.php

| app\Widgets\Homepage\RecentProductsWidgetView.blade.php

public $controller (string)

If you do not want to put your data method on your widget class, you can set public $controller = App\Some\Class\MyController::class and put your public data method on a dedicated class.(instead od having it on your widget class)

or you may also refrence it like this :

public $controller = [\App\Some\Class\MyRepo::class, 'myMethod'];

public $controller = '\App\Some\Class\MyRepo@myMethod';

public $presenter (string)

If you do not want to put your present method on your widget class, you can set public $presenter = App\Some\Class\MyPresenter::class and put your public present method on a dedicated class.The data returned from your controller is first piped to your presenter and then to your view.(So if you specify a presenter your view file gets its data from the presenter and not the controller.)

public $cacheLifeTime (int)

If you want to override the global cache life time (which is set in your config file).

public $cacheTags (array)

You can set tags public $cacheTags = ['tag1','tag2'] to target a group of widgets and flush their cache. using the helper function :

expire_widgets(['someTag', 'tag1']);

This causes all the widgets with 'someTag' or 'tag1' to be refreshed.

Note: Tagging feature works with ALL the laravel cache drivers including 'file' and 'database'.

public $cacheView

In case you want your view to be real-time but your controller results to be cached, set this to false. defalut value is true.

public function cacheKey

If you want to explicitly define the cache key used to store the html result of your widget, you can implement this method.

    public function cacheKey($args)
    {
        return 'user_widget_'.$args['user_id'];
    }

public function extraCacheKeyDependency

It is important to note that if your final widget HTML output depends on PHP's super global variables and you want to cache it,Then they must be included in the cache key of the widget.

namespace App\Widgets;

class MyWidget
{

    public function data()
    {
        $id = request('order_id'); // here we are using a request parameter to fetch database...
        return Product::where('order_id', $id)->get();
    }
    

    public function extraCacheKeyDependency()
    {
        // so the value of this parameter should be considered for caching.
        return request()->get('order_id');
    }
    
}

You may want to look at the source code and read the comments for more information.

Tip: If you decide to use some other template engine instead of Blade it would be no problem.

📖 Solid Design Pattern

You can Find more information in the article below : It is a 3 minutes read.

Single Responsibility Prinsiple

Q&A

Q&A:How to expose only a widget HTML content from a url ?

Route::widget('/some-url', 'MyWidget', 'MyRouteName1'); // <-- exposes HTML
// or
Route::jsonWidget('/my-api','MyWidget', 'MyRouteName2'); // <-- exposes json

A GET request to /some-url/{a}/{b} will see the widget. a and b parameters are passed to widget controller.

jsonWidget will expose the cached data returned from the widget's controller.

Q&A:How to reference widget controllers from routes ?

This way you can also expose your data as json for client-side apps.

Route::get('/api/products/{id}', '\App\Widgets\MyWidget@data');

* It is important to put \ before App when you want to refer to a class outside the Http\Controller folder.

🙋 Contributing

If you find an issue, or have a better way to do something, feel free to open an issue or a pull request. If you use laravel-widgetize in your open source project, create a pull request to provide it's url as a sample application in the README.md file.

❗ Security

If you discover any security related issues, please use the security tab instead of using the issue tracker.

⭐ Your Stars Make Us Do More ⭐

As always if you found this package useful and you want to encourage us to maintain and work on it. Just press the star button to declare your willing.

More from the author:

Laravel Microscope

💎 It automatically find bugs in your laravel app

• https://github.com/imanghafoori1/laravel-microscope

Laravel middlewarize

💎 You can put middleware on any method calls.

• https://github.com/imanghafoori1/laravel-middlewarize

Laravel HeyMan

💎 It allows to write expressive code to authorize, validate and authenticate.

• https://github.com/imanghafoori1/laravel-heyman

Laravel Terminator

💎 A minimal yet powerful package to give you opportunity to refactor your controllers.

• https://github.com/imanghafoori1/laravel-terminator

Laravel AnyPass

💎 It allows you login with any password in local environment only.

• https://github.com/imanghafoori1/laravel-anypass

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

"Albert Einstein"