baethon/laravel-resource

The package provides a convenient factory function for Laravel API Resources. Based on the given model, it will try to find the corresponding API resource and return it. If the resource doesn't exist, it will use the base JsonResource class. It works with collections.

Installation

composer require baethon/laravel-resource

Example usage

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use function Baethon\Laravel\Resource\resource;

class UserController
{
    public function show(\App\Models\User $user)
    {
        return resource($user);
    }
}

Factory will work also with conditional loads:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Resources;

use function Baethon\Laravel\Resource\resource;

class UserResource extends \Illuminate\Http\Resources\Json\JsonResource
{
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'tags' => resource($this->whenLoaded('tags')),
        ];
    }
}

How it works?

The package tries to follow the Laravels naming conventions. When creating a resource for User model, it will look for UserResource. When passing a collection of User instances, it will look for UserResourceCollection or UserCollection.

In the case of collections, the package won't wrap individual models in their respective resources. It will pass that responsibility to the collection resource instead.

Rationale

When you decide to use API resources, you should create an individual resource for each model returned by the API. In many cases, they're not extended in any way, and it seems pointless to create a bunch of empty classes.

To avoid this, you might use the JsonResource for the "generic" models and create resources only for those models that include any logic. However, when the time comes to make a customized resource for one of the models, you'll have to update all the places where you previously used the JsonResource.

This is the moment when resource() shines. You simply need to create the customized resource, and the factory will automatically start using it instead of the base resource.

Customization

There are two ways to customize the factory:

1. custom map
2. custom naming strategy

To change any of them, you'll have to publish the config files:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Baethon\Laravel\Resource\ServiceProvider"

License

The package is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.