Laravel Route Model Bindings - Implicit Vs. Explicit Binding
There’s this neat feature in Laravel where you can validate model IDs that have been injected into the route by injecting model instances directly at route level.
For instance, instead of injecting post_id in the following URL, say, 'api/posts/{post_id}' and writing all the business logic ourselves just to validate the model IDs, we can directly pass the entire Post model instance that matches the given ID in the URL.
You can achieve this using two methods: Implicit Model Binding and Explicit Model Binding.
Implicit Binding
In this method, you’d directly inject model instance into the route or controller actions whose time-hinted variable names match a route segment name. Let’s write above example using this approach.
Route::get('api/posts/{post}', function (App\Post $post) {
return $post->title;
});
//e.g. => http://myblog.com/api/posts/12
Notice here, we passed $post variable to the route’s closure which is type-hinted as the App\Post eloquoent model and the variable name matches the {post} URI segment of the URL. Laravel will then automatically inject the model instance that has an id field matching the corresponding value from the request URI. If a matching model instance is not found in the database, a 404 HTTP response will automatically be generated for that particular route.
You may also like: Route model bindings using custom columns in Laravel 7
Explicit Binding
As the name suggests, this approach requires you to register an “explicit” binding by using the router’s model method to specify the class for a given parameter. You can achieve this by defining your explicit model bindings in the boot method of the RouteServiceProvider class. Let’s now rewrite the above example using this approach.
public function boot()
{
parent::boot();
Route::model('post', App\Post::class);
}
Now, define a route that contains a post param:
Route::get('posts/{post}', function (App\Post $post) {
// Do something here
});
Since we have bound all {post} parameters to the App\Post model, a User instance will be injected into the route. So, for example, a request to posts/7 will inject the Post instance from the database which has an id of 7. If it doesn’t find the matching model instance for the specified id, it will generate a 404 response automatically.
The difference between implicit and explicit binding is you can additionally specify a customized logic into the boot method of the RouteServiceProvider class while doing explicit binding. Let’s check the following code:
public function boot()
{
parent::boot();
Route::bind('post', function ($value) {
return App\Post::where('slug', $value)->first() ?? abort(404);
});
}
//e.g. => http://myblog.com/posts/new-in-laravel
As you can see here, We’ve used Route::bind method to write our own logic. Now, instead of checking the ‘post’ with the model’s id field, Eloquoent will now check for the customised logic we’ve written into the Closure of the bind method. Here, for the above example URL, new-in-laravel will be passed as $value to the Closure which will then be check against the specified custom condition and return the result accordingly.
Alternatively, you may override the resolveRouteBinding method on your Eloquent model.
// App\Post model
public function resolveRouteBinding($value)
{
return $this->where('slug', $value)->first() ?? abort(404);
}
Like this article?
Buy me a coffee
👋 Hi there! I'm Amit. I write articles about all things web development. You can become a sponsor on my blog to help me continue my writing journey and get your brand in front of thousands of eyes.
