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Widgets for Laravel

A powerful alternative to view composers. Asynchronous widgets, reloadable widgets, console generator, caching - everything you can think of.

Installation

1) Run

2) Register a service provider in the app.php configuration file

3) Add some facades here too. If you prefer custom blade directives to facades you can skip this step.

Usage

Let's consider we want to make a list of recent news and reuse it in several views.

First of all we can create a Widget class using the artisan command provided by the package.

This command generates two files:

1) resources/views/widgets/recent_news.blade.php is an empty view.

Add "--plain" option if you do not need a view.

2) app/Widgets/RecentNews is a widget class.

Note: You can use your own stubs if you need. Publish config file to change paths.

The last step is to call the widget. You've actually got several ways to do so.

or

or even

There is no real difference between them. The choice is up to you.

Note: For Laravel 5.0.0 - 5.1.3 you have to use {!! !!} tags instead of {{ }}

Passing variables to widget

Via config array

Let's carry on with the "recent news" example.

Imagine that we usually need to show five news, but in some views we need to show ten. This can be easily achieved like that:

['count' => 10] is a config array that can be accessed by $this->config.

Config array is available in every widget method so you can use it to configure placeholder and container too (see below)

Note: Config fields that are not specified when you call a widget aren't overridden:

Note 2: You may want (but you probably don't) to create your own BaseWidget and inherit from it. That's fine. The only edge case is merging config defaults from a parent and a child. In this case do the following:

1) Do not add protected $config = [...] line to a child.

2) Add defaults like that instead:

Directly

You can also choose to pass additional parameters to run() method directly.

run() method is resolved via Service Container, so method injection is also available here.

Namespaces

By default the package tries to find your widget in the namespace.

You can override this by publishing package config () and setting default_namespace property.

Although using the default namespace is very convenient, in some cases you may wish to have more flexibility. For example, if you've got dozens of widgets it makes sense to group them in namespaced folders.

No problem, you have several ways to call those widgets:

1) Pass a full widget name from the default_namespace (basically App\Widgets) to the run method.

2) Use dot notation.

3) FQCN is also an option.

Asynchronous widgets

In some situations it can be very beneficial to load widget content with AJAX.

Fortunately, this can be achieved very easily! All you need to do is to change facade or blade directive - Widget:: => AsyncWidget::, @widget => @asyncWidget

Note: Widget params are encrypted and sent via ajax call. Expect them to be json_encoded and json_decoded afterwards.

Note: Since version 3.1 you no longer need jquery to make ajax calls. However you can set use_jquery_for_ajax_calls to true in the config file if you want to.

By default nothing is shown until ajax call is finished.

This can be customized by adding a placeholder() method to the widget class.

Side note: If you need to do smth with the routes package uses to load async widgets (e.g. you run app in a subfolder http://site.com/app/) you need to copy ArtisanCMS\Widgets\ServiceProvider to your app, modify it according to your needs and register it in Laravel instead of the former one.

Reloadable widgets

You can go even further and automatically reload widget every N seconds.

Just set the $reloadTimeout property of the widget class and you are done.

Both sync and async widgets can become reloadable.

You should use this feature with care, because it can easily spam your app with ajax calls if timeouts are too low. Consider using web sockets too but they are way harder to set up.

Container

Async and Reloadable widgets both require some DOM interaction so they wrap all widget output in a html container. This container is defined by AbstractWidget::container() method and can be customized too.

Note: Nested async or reloadable widgets are not supported.

Caching

There is also a simple built-in way to cache entire widget output. Just set $cacheTime property in your widget class and you are done.

No caching is turned on by default. A cache key depends on a widget name and each widget parameter. Override method if you need to adjust it.

Widget groups (extra)

In most cases Blade is a perfect tool for setting the position and order of widgets. However, sometimes you may find useful the following approach:

position() can be omitted from the chain.

Widget::group('sidebar')->addWidget('files');

equals

Widget::group('sidebar')->position(100)->addWidget('files');

You can also set a separator to display between widgets in a group. Widget::group('sidebar')->setSeparator('<hr>');

Checking the state of a widget group

Widget::group('sidebar')->isEmpty(); // bool

Widget::group('sidebar')->any(); // bool

Widget::group('sidebar')->count(); // int