Creating and Viewing a Subweddit

 To begin making a subweddit, we must make 4 things - 

  • A Subweddit model
  • A make_subweddit_table migration
  • A Subweddit factory (a useful laravel technique for filling a database table with fake data
  • A subweddit Controller, to control the data

All 3 can be made by the command:

php artisan make:model Subweddit -fmc

(the suffix -fmc does the magic, making the factory, migration and controller)

For the miagration - this is the layout as it stands:


Apart from the ordinary id and timestamps, the subweddit table contains the subweddit name, bio and mod_id, which, by default, is the user who created the subweddit, they will be able to delete the subweddit, and in the future remove posts as well as comments from posts. 


Now we are able to fill in the factory to create some fake data.

after altering SubwedditFactory.php to look like so



and attempting to use the factory by running 

factory(App\Models\Subweddit)->create(); 

I encountered a problem 




PHP Fatal error: Undefined constant App\Models\Subweddit in Psy Shell code on line 1


This was due to laravel 8 using a different way of defining, and calling factories.

After updating the factory file to look like so:



and calling:

App\Models\Subweddit::factory()->create();

we got our first results!



We can now update our routes so that visiting '/w/{subweddit}', will call the SubwedditController 'show' which simply returns a view, passing in the data from the given subweddit



Now, instead of using a factory, lets try create our own subweddit using a form. I started by adapting my routes file to include 'w/create' and adding a method 'create' to the controller to return a page showing a form to create a subweddit.


As you can see, this sends a post request to '/w/', which calls the 'store' method in the Subweddit Controller which creates an instance of the subweddit object and binds the given attributes from the post request to the according database columns.



A nifty trick is to import Illuminate/Support/Facades/Auth, this way we can retrieve the authenticated user by
calling Auth::id. In this case, we are setting the authenticated user as the subweddit mod.

We now have subweddits!

·

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Final Database Design

Image
This is a view of the tables at the end of the project: Subweddit: Subweddit includes an id, name, bio and logo for display and information purposes as well a mod_id, the moderator of the subweddit (the subweddit creator by default right now) Post: Post has a title and body, as well as an optional img field. slug is created from the title field being 'slugified' with underscores (_). As well as this, the author of the post is saved as user_id, and the subweddit the post belongs to is also present. Follow: The follow table is the simplest in the database. apart from the laravel created_at and updated_at fields, this table simply holds the user id and the subweddit id of the subweddit the user follows. Comment: Comment holds one text field as 'body', as well as the author (user_id), and the post it belongs to (post_id). Finally, there is a nullable parent_id column which would be used if the comment is a reply, holding the id of the comment being replied to.
Read more

Views and Policies

Image
Although maximum functionality is achieved by being a logged in user, it is important to think of guest users browsing the site. Baring that in mind lets run through the abilities guests and users: Guest: Home feed showing most recent posts from all subweddits view subweddit and contents view post and comments sign up User: Log in Personalised home feed Create subweddit Follow Subweddit Create Post Post comment/reply to preface: guest and user views could have been achieved in a cleaner way by creating seperate routes in web.php and stating if the user is logged in, redirect to 'logged-in' views, or otherwise 'guest' views. As my AWS instance is running on micro I chose to slim my application down so as not to overload my tiny server. Thusly, I opted for utilising @auth and @guest in the blade file. Not very clean, but effective and 'cost' efficient Starting with the index page: if the page is viewed by a guest, then display all posts from all subweddits, filter...
Read more

Validation

Image
validation, both serverside and clientside, is essential  for a satisfactory user experience, and for security.  This application makes use of several forms, so it is important that the site be completely tamper-proof. Thankfully, Laravel takes helps the cause, with the @csrf tag, which prevents csrf attacks, or cross-site request forgery. (explain this). validation on the registration is handled largely by the livewire auth package, the only tweak made is validation for the username, which was covered in the auth blog post. which leaves 5 forms to validate: create subweddit create post edit post create comment create reply Client side, all of the validation can be handled by laravel's @error directive, which will quickly determine if there is a validation error in an attribute. The message can be displayed by calling the array $errors. With our Bulma framework, we can make things look a little prettier for the user by changing the form border to red and displaying the red err...
Read more