Displaying Records Using a Controller

In this Laravel tutorial, we will learn how to use a Controller to:

Fetch and display all records.
Find and display a single record.

Use the existing Laravel project or create a new one in the terminal:

laravel new laravel-controllers

Start a local server with:

composer run dev

Or with:

php artisan serve

Creating the articles table

Navigate to the project's folder and create a migration:

php artisan make:migration create_articles_table

Creating a migration file that creates the articles table.

Open the newly created migration file whose name ends with the _create_articles_table.php and paste the following code:

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

return new class extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     */
    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('articles', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->string('title');
            $table->text('article_text');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     */
    public function down(): void
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('articles');
    }
};

This code create the articles table with the following columns:

id
title
article_text
created_at
updated_at

To modify the database's schema and insert this table into a database, run a migration:

php artisan migrate

Inserting sample records

To insert a few sample records to our articles table, start a tinker command-line tool:

php artisan tinker

Starting the tinker command-line tool to insert sample records.

And paste and execute the following code:

DB::table('articles')->insert([
    [
        'title' => 'Article no. 1',
        'article_text' => 'The text for the first article.',
        'created_at' => now(),
        'updated_at' => now(),
    ],
    [
        'title' => 'Article no. 2',
        'article_text' => 'The text for the second article.',
        'created_at' => now(),
        'updated_at' => now(),
    ],
    [
        'title' => 'Article no. 3',
        'article_text' => 'The text for the third article.',
        'created_at' => now(),
        'updated_at' => now(),
    ],
]);
exit;

This code inserts several sample records into the articles table and exits the tinker tool.

Creating an Article model

To create an Article model that represents our articles table, we execute the following command in a terminal:

php artisan make:model Article

Creating an Article model class that represents the articles table.

This command creates the app/Models/Article.php file having an Article model that represents our articles table. Using naming conventions, this model directly maps to/represents our articles table and no additional work is needed for the model. We will use this model to fetch records.

Creating the ArticleController controller

We will create a controller that:

Handles the articles-related routes.
Queries records.
Returns views and displays records.

In the terminal window, we execute the following command:

php artisan make:controller ArticleController

Creating an ArticleController controller in a Laravel project.

This command creates an ArticleController.php file, prefills it with an empty ArticleController class and places it inside the app/Http/Controllers/ folder. Let us open the ArticleController.php file and paste the following code:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\Article;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class ArticleController extends Controller
{
    public function index() // show all records
    {
        $myArticles = Article::all(); // fetch all records
        return view('articles', ['myArticles' => $myArticles]); // return a view with all the records
    }

    public function show(string $id) // show a single record
    {
        $myArticle = Article::where('id', $id)->firstOrFail(); // find a single record by an id column
        return view('show-article', ['myArticle' => $myArticle]); // return a view with a single record
    }
}

This code uses the previously-created Article class via the following statement:

use App\Models\Article;

We have also created two public methods for the ArticleController class, called index() and show(string $id).

The index() public method

The index() public function is used for handling the '/articles' route and displaying all the records in a view. It uses the Article model to fetch all the records from an articles table and store them in a local $myArticles variable:

 $myArticles = Article::all(); // fetch all records

Then, it passes the $myArticles collection to the articles view and returns an articles view.

return view('articles', ['myArticles' => $myArticles]); // return a view with all the records

Note: The articles view (Blade template file) will be created in the next section.

The show(string $id) public method

The show(string $id) method will be used to handle the 'articles/'showarticle/{id}' parameterized route. This method accepts the value of the {id} parameter and passes it to the $id argument. It uses the $id argument and the Article model to find a single record whose id column matches the $id value and store the result in the $myArticle local variable.

 $myArticle = Article::where('id', $id)->firstOrFail(); // find a single record by an id column

Next, it passes the $myArticle variable/collection to a show-article view and displays/returns this view.

return view('show-article', ['myArticle' => $myArticle]); // return a view with a single record

Note: We will create the show-article view in the next section.

In summary, our ArticleController class now handles two routes, queries records and displays views. The first method lists all the records and the second method lists a single record. Both methods return views.

Creating views

In this section, we will create two views named articles and show-article.

Creating the 'articles' view

To create the articles view, in the terminal we write:

php artisan make:view articles

Creating the articles view in a Laravel project.

Open the newly created articles.blade.php file and paste the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Showing All Records</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Showing All Records</h1>

    @foreach ($myArticles as $myArticle)
    <h2>{{ $myArticle->title }}</h2>
    <p>{{ $myArticle->article_text }}</p>
    @endforeach

</body>
</html>

This code uses the @foreach directive to loop over the $myArticles variable/collection and display all the records in a collection. We use the blade echo {{ }} statements to print out the value of a particular column using the following syntax {{ $record_name->column_name }}.

Creating the 'show-article' view

To create the show-article view, in the terminal we write:

php artisan make:view show-article

Creating the show-article view in a Laravel project.

Open the newly created show-article.blade.php file and paste the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Showing A Single Record</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Showing A Single Record</h1>

    <h2>{{ $myArticle->title }}</h2>
    <p>{{ $myArticle->article_text }}</p>

</body>
</html>

This code uses the $myArticle variable to display a single record in a web page.

Connecting routes with controllers

Open a web.php file and paste the following code:

<?php

use App\Http\Controllers\ArticleController;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::get('/articles', [ArticleController::class, 'index']);
Route::get('/articles/showarticle/{id}', [ArticleController::class, 'show']);

Explanation

This code uses the following statement to include the ArticleController class into the web.php file:

use App\Http\Controllers\ArticleController;

The following statement uses the Route::get() function to define the '/articles' route and invoke the ArticleController's index() method for that route:

Route::get('/articles', [ArticleController::class, 'index']);

The following statement defines a parameterized '/articles/show-article{id}' route and uses/invokes the show(string $id) method for this route:

Route::get('/articles/showarticle/{id}', [ArticleController::class, 'show']);

Displaying records in a browser

If we access the '/articles' route in a browser, the browser displays the HTML code that shows all the records from the articles table:

Using a controller to fetch and display all table records in a browser in a Laravel app.

If we access the '/articles/showarticle/2' route in a browser, we see the HTML output which shows a single record with an id of 2:

Using a controller to find and display a single record in a Laravel app.

Note: By some widely adopted naming conventions, the controller method that displays all the records should be called index and the controller method that shows a single record should be named show. Similarly, the template that shows all the records can be named index.blade.php and the template that shows a single record can be named show.blade.php.