Example 4-15. Sharing a variable globally

view()->share('posts', Post::recent());

You’ll likely place this code in some form of custom ViewComposerServiceProvider (see [Link to Come] to learn more about Service Providers), but for now you could also just put it in App\Providers\AppServiceProvider in the boot method.

Using view()→share() makes the variable accessible to every view in the entire application, however, so it might be overkill.

Creating a Closure-based view composer

view()->composer('partials.sidebar', function ($view) { $view->with('posts', Post::recent()); });

As you can see, we’ve defined the name of the view we want it shared with (partials.sidebar) in the first parameter and then passed a Closure to the second parameter; in the Closure, we’ve used $view→with() to share a variable, but now only with a specific view.

A view composer

<?php namespace App\Http\ViewComposers; use App\Post; use Illuminate\Contracts\View\View; class RecentPostsComposer { private $posts; public function __construct(Post $posts) { $this->posts = $posts; } public function compose(View $view) { $view->with('posts', $this->posts->recent()); } }

As you can see, we’re injecting the Post model (type-hinted constructor parameters of view composers will be automatically injected; see [Link to Come] for more on the container and dependency injection). Note that we could skip the private $posts and the constructor injection and just used Post::recent() in the compose method if we wanted. Then when this composer is called, it runs the compose method, in which we bind the posts variable to the result of the recent() method.

Just like the other methods of sharing variables, this view composer needs to have a binding somewhere. Again, you’d likely create a custom ViewComposerServiceProvider, but for now we’ll just put it in the boot method of App\Providers\AppServiceProvider.

view()->composer( 'partials.sidebar', 'App\Http\ViewComposers\RecentPostsComposer' );