# Basic controllers

Controllers are classes that are in charge of the grunt work of preparing the data to pass to the views
Our goal is to move the logic (now in the file routes/web.php) to their corresponding controllers (opens new window)
Make a new controller class with the terminal command php artisan make:controller Admin/RecordController

$ php artisan make:controller Admin/RecordController
 
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NAMING CONVENTIONS

The name of a controller equals the singular "object" name, starting with a capital letter (e.g. Record), followed by Controller

REMARK

Several courses/programmers use the plural noun of the "object" in the controller name (e.g. RecordsController), although this is in contrast to the approach used in the official Laravel documentation

Open the controller Admin/RecordController.php (located in folder app/Http/Controllers/Admin)
- Namespacing is (automatically) taken care of
- The necessary imports (the statements with the keyword use) are included

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers\Admin;

use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class RecordController extends Controller
{
    //
}
 
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REMARK

Notice the use of backslashes (\ ) in the namespace and use statements

Migrate all the code of the (anonymous function in the) 'admin/records' route to a new method index() in this controller
- Add a new, fourth record to ensure that this approach will work

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers\Admin;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;

class RecordController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $records = [
            'Queen - Greatest Hits',
            'The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers',
            'The Beatles - Abbey Road',
            'The Who - Tommy'
        ];

        return view('admin.records.index', [
            'records' => $records
        ]);
    }
}
 
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Call this method index() in the 'admin/records' route in the routes/web.php file:
- Line 2: is the namespace (starting from App\Http\Controllers) and name of the controller (Admin\RecordController)
- Line 8: the second argument of the Route::get() method is an array:
  - the first element refers to the RecordController class
  - the second refers to the name of the method in that controller that has to be called (index)

<?php

use App\Http\Controllers\Admin\RecordController;
...

Route::prefix('admin')->name('admin.')->group(function () {
    Route::redirect('/', '/admin/records');
    Route::get('records', [RecordController::class, 'index'])->name('records.index');
});

...
 
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Check the result in a browser by visiting http://vinyl_shop.test/admin/records (opens new window)

Records controller