Methods for Staying Organized

Laravel 4 already has a place for pretty much everything, so it feels organized out of the box. However, the larger your application is the more unorganized it starts to feel. Here are a few small things I do to help keep things organized.

Namespace Controllers and Models

This one is pretty simple, but I namespace all of my controllers and models. For instance, UserController.php might look like this:

app/controllers/UserController.php

namespace App\Controllers;
class UserController extends BaseController
{
    // code goes here
}

My models generally are namespaced like so:

app/models/User.php

namespace App\Models;
class User extends \Eloquent
{
    protected $table = 'users';
    // code goes here
}

Map Table Prefixes to Namespaces

Let’s assume the following: we have a business and the business has many executives. This is a one-to-many relationship; the business can have many executives and each executive belongs to the business.

The tables businesses and business_executives seems reasonable for this setup. Since the executives belong to the business we prefix the executives table with business_. To help organize the related models I like to utilize namespacing. The related models would look like this:

app/models/Business.php

namespace App\Models;
class Business extends \Eloquent
{
    protected $table = 'businesses';
    public function executives()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('App\Models\Business\Executive');
    }
}

app/models/business/Executive.php

namespace App\Models\Business;
class Executive extends \Eloquent
{
    protected $table = 'business_executives';
    public function business()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('App\Models\Business');
    }
}

Utilize Repositories

Jeffrey Way wrote an excellent article that covers the use of repositories within Laravel (scroll down to the Repositories heading), so I’ll refer you to that article if you’re not sure what repositories are.

However, in short repositories are an additional level of abstraction. They sit between your controllers and your models and act as a data-access layer, allowing your controllers to query data without accessing your models directly.

This is especially useful if you don’t want to muddy up your Eloquent models (keep them “pure”) or if you have specific functionality that requires several models; for instance, if your application is creating an event with several occurrences and must insert both Event and EventOccurrence models then you can perform both of these actions within a single method in the repository. An example might look like this:

app/repositories/EventRepository.php

namespace App\Repositories;
use App\Models\Event;
use App\Models\Event\Occurrence;
class EventRepository
{
    public function save()
    {
        $event = new Event;
        // populate event properties
        $event->save();
        $eventOccurrence = new Occurrence;
        // populate event occurrence properties
        $event->occurrences()->save($eventOccurrence);
    }
}

The repository is also a great place to consolidate validations. In the previous example, validations for both models can be performed within the save() method, and validation rules for saving an event can be stored together in the repository rather than separately within the models (or together in the controller) – this helps keep your models clean and your controllers slim.

If you have any of your own methods for organizing projects please post them in the comments below!