Skip to main content

Props for Laravel's Blade Templating

While perhaps not as powerful as the Twig template engine, Laravel's Blade template engine does pretty much everything you're likely to need done in your view templates and it does it with more intuitive syntax. So I wanted to give it some props here that it very much deserves.

To boil Blade down to its very basics, there are three essential construct types you need to know:

  1. {{ $var }} - output a variable
  2. {!! $html !!} - output some HTML (previously sanitized, we hope)
  3. @something - the equivalent of the if/else/foreach statements in PHP
Basically, any PHP statement you need to use will work within the body of these three constructs. So here are some control flow statements in Blade:

@foreach ($companies as $i => $company)
@endforeach

@if ($something === null)
@endif

And here are three versions of an echo statement that all work the same:

{{ $name === null ? 'Unknown Name' : $name }}

{{ $name or 'Unknown Name' }}

{{ $name ?? 'Unknown Name' }}

(Note: this last statement requires PHP7+)

Why is all this important? The main benefit here is in keeping your output statements very simple. After all, you want your view template to be all about the HTML, not the underlying code.

As an example of a real-life benefit, here's an issue I ran across recently:

When beginning a project, the client specified that they needed to know whether a person owned or rented their property. So I created a boolean field called "own". If not owned, then rented...right?

Nearing project completion, the client tells me that they need to also know if the question wasn't answered.  So now we have three states...own, rented and null.  Rather than ditch my boolean field, I can take advantage of the nullable property of the database field.  Unfortunately, the backend database and O/S that hosts this application differ from development to staging/production, so I can't guarantee that the model's value will return NULL, a boolean, an integer or string.  Thankfully, all I have to do is update my blade statement, like so:

{{ $own === null || $own === "" ? "" :  $own == 1 ? "Own" : "Rent" }}

Smooth...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

jQuery noUIslider Pip Label Customization

Recently, I was tasked with creating a slider element for a user to select their credit rating, of which the user can select from among: 'Poor', 'Fair', 'Good', 'Excellent' and 'Not Sure'.  Several problems presented themselves here: A drop-down box would be better, but that's not what the requirements specified. I already have several numeric sliders on my page and I want them all to match. I selected the jQuery noUi Slider library to create the numeric sliders. noUi Slider does not support string values - only numeric values. The "pips" (slider scale/labels) also does not support string values. Since the solution involved shifting my mindset, I wanted to document it here for future reference and maybe to help someone facing the same requirements. Here's my solution: Since there is really no numeric correlation to credit score (especially considering one of the options is "Not Sure"), I will just u...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Create a new Case Record Type in Salesforce

Here are the specific steps for adding a case record type. Some steps may vary by organization but the process should be pretty similar to what is shown here. 1) Create a new page layout 2) Add any new case statuses to picklist 3) Edit case statuses that should indicate case is "closed" 4) Add any new case types to picklist 5) Add any new case reasons to picklist 6) Add any new case origins to picklist 7) Add any new fields to case object 8) Under Record Types, ensure the picklists have the correct values (i.e. - Reason/Type/Origin) 9) Within the Type field, edit "Reason" field dependencies matrix and add new reason(s) to types 10) Create a new support process (if not reusing an existing one) 11) Create the new record type (enable for all profiles) 12) Finalize the page layout (if needed) and check "Default" in Case Assignment checkbox under Layout Properties 13) Create approval queues (if needed) 14) Set up approv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Regarding Technology (a departure from WebDev)

I'm departing from WebDev for a minute to blog about technology. I'm as guilty of over-indulging in technology as anyone, especially given that my career demands a technology overload. Today at noon is the solar eclipse and that prompted me to think about the past and the future. I started to think about where the world stands and a song came up on my playlist that seemed perfect for my mood. 27 years ago, Bad Religion wrote a song about the current generation of kids. It would be prophetic if it weren't for the fact that the trend had already begun back then. In any event, it seems now is a good time to look back at the lyrics: 'Cause I'm a twenty-first century digital boy I don't know how to live but I got a lot of toys My daddy's a lazy middle-class intellectual My mommy's on Valium, so ineffectual What child these days does not have multiple devices to play with? Gaming systems, television, computers and tablets are in nearly every home. Kid...
Post a Comment
Read more