Access Controller method from another controller in Laravel 5

Question

I have two controllers SubmitPerformanceController and PrintReportController.

In PrintReportController I have a method called getPrintReport.

How to access this method in SubmitPerformanceController?

Answer 1

You can access your controller method like this:

app('App\Http\Controllers\PrintReportController')->getPrintReport();

This will work, but it's bad in terms of code organisation (remember to use the right namespace for your PrintReportController)

You can extend the PrintReportController so SubmitPerformanceController will inherit that method

class SubmitPerformanceController extends PrintReportController {
     // ....
}

But this will also inherit all other methods from PrintReportController.

The best approach will be to create a trait (e.g. in app/Traits), implement the logic there and tell your controllers to use it:

trait PrintReport {

    public function getPrintReport() {
        // .....
    }
}

Tell your controllers to use this trait:

class PrintReportController extends Controller {
     use PrintReport;
}

class SubmitPerformanceController extends Controller {
     use PrintReport;
}

Both solutions make SubmitPerformanceController to have getPrintReport method so you can call it with $this->getPrintReport(); from within the controller or directly as a route (if you mapped it in the routes.php)

You can read more about traits here.