Inject models in laravel's controllers's constructors or laravel's controller's concrete function

Question

Imagine situation that in laravels constructor(PostController) I need to Inject 3 models: User, Post and Comment.

I have two scenarios:

1) Inject these 3 Models all in controllers constructor and then I use this controllers variables in concrete functions like this: $this->post

2) Inject these models in concrete controller's functions whenever, wherever needed (For example index(Post $post));

which of these two is better practice? In first scenario, in index function I only use $this->post variable, but I also create $this->comment and $this->user because I need them in other functions? but I don't need them in index, so I inject and create them for nothing whenever I call index by addressing index specific route. Isn't that bad? so which of these is better?

you can't inject Models. why would you want that? there may be a better solution for your problem — Fatemeh Majd
– Fatemeh Majd, Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 13:31
Because I don't want to write $user = new User(); then I will not be able to mock this $user variable when testing — O. Shekriladze
– O. Shekriladze, Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 13:34

omitobi · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-19 13:38:31Z

6

Generally, When you inject a model in a controller method it means that you're trying to bind a route value to the model. In a simple term, you want laravel to auto-magically fetch that model for you.

On the other hand, when you inject it via the __construct(), you want those models to be instantiated for your use within the class. In simple term, you want Laravel to create a new instance of that model within the class.

Let's go practical:

First situation

//routes

Route::get('/ninjas/{ninja}') //ninja is a number or anything that identifies a model

//Controller

public function index(Ninja $ninja)
{        
    //$ninja will be a resolved model
}

Other situation,

public function __construct(Ninja $ninja)
{        
    $this->ninja = $ninja;
}

public function index($ninja_id)
{        
    $this->ninja->find($ninja_id)
}

As you can see from the above examples, it depends on the use case. That is, if you intend to bind a model to the route then, you inject to controller methods otherwise if you want use your models in a cleaner way then, up to the constructor.

Cheers!

PS: A side note, asking for best practice normally attracts opinionated answer which would make finding a correct answer hard.

answered Dec 19, 2018 at 13:38

omitobi

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2 Comments

O. Shekriladze Over a year ago

what do you mean in "you're trying to bind a route value to the model"

omitobi Over a year ago

@O.Shekriladze I explained in the first sentence: In a simple term, you want laravel to auto-magically fetch that model for you. What it mean is what I showed in the first situation, where you pass an id into the route e.g ninjas/1 and in your controller method Laravel fetches that model for you.

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