View Composers and Sharing

Introduction

Very often you will find yourself adding the same variables to a view again and again. This might look something like

def show(self):
    return view('dashboard', {'request': request()})

def another_method(self):
    return view('dashboard/user', {'request': request()})

This can quickly become annoying and it can be much easier if you can just have a variable available in all your templates. For this, we can "share" a variable with all our templates with the View class.

The View class is loaded into our container under the ViewClass alias. It's important to note that the ViewClass alias from the container points to the class itself and the View from the container points to the View.render method. By looking at the ViewProvider this will make more sense:

class ViewProvider(ServiceProvider):

    wsgi = False

    def register(self):
        view = View()
        self.app.bind('ViewClass', view)
        self.app.bind('View', view.render)

As you can see, we bind the view class itself to ViewClass and the render method to the View alias.

View Sharing

We can share variables with all templates by simply specifying them in the .share() method like so:

ViewClass.share({'request': request()})

The best place to put this is in a new Service Provider. Let's create one now called ViewComposer.

$ craft provider ViewComposer

This will create a new Service Provider under app/providers/ViewComposer.py and should look like this:

class ViewComposer(ServiceProvider):

    def register(self):
        pass

    def boot(self):
        pass

We also don't need it to run on every request so we can set wsgi to False. Doing this will only run this provider when the server first boots up. This will minimize the overhead needed on every request:

class ViewComposer(ServiceProvider):

    wsgi = False

    def register(self):
        pass

    def boot(self):
        pass

Great!

Since we need the request, we can throw it in the boot method which has access to everything registered into the service container, including the Request class.

class ViewComposer(ServiceProvider):

    wsgi = False

    def register(self):
        pass

    def boot(self, ViewClass, Request):
        ViewClass.share({'request': Request})

Lastly we need to load this into our PROVIDERS list inside our config/application.py file.

PROVIDERS = [
    # Framework Providers
    ...
    'masonite.providers.ViewProvider.ViewProvider',
    'masonite.providers.HelpersProvider.HelpersProvider',

    # Third Party Providers

    # Application Providers
    'app.providers.UserModelProvider.UserModelProvider',
    'app.providers.MiddlewareProvider.MiddlewareProvider',
    'app.providers.ViewComposer.ViewComposer', # <- New Service Provider
]

And we're done! When you next start your server, the request variable will be available on all templates.

View Composing

In addition to sharing these variables with all templates, we can also specify only certain templates. All steps will be exactly the same but instead of the .share() method, we can use the .composer() method:

def boot(self, ViewClass, Request):
    ViewClass.composer('dashboard', {'request': Request})

Now anytime the dashboard template is accessed (the one at resources/templates/dashboard.html) the request variable will be available.

We can also specify several templates which will do the same as above but this time with the resources/templates/dashboard.html template AND the resources/templates/dashboard/user.html template:

def boot(self, ViewClass, Request):
    ViewClass.composer(['dashboard', 'dashboard/user'], {'request': Request})

We can compose a dictionary for all templates:

def boot(self, ViewClass, Request):
    ViewClass.composer('*', {'request': Request})

Note that this has exactly the same behavior as ViewClass.share()

Lastly, we can use wildcard composers with template names:

ViewClass.composer(['dashboard*'], {'request': Request})

This will match templates such as resources/templates/dashboard.html.This will also match templates in an entire directory structures such as resources/templates/dashboard/user.html A nice shorthand from a list of templates and much more scalable.

Check For Existing Views

You may need to check if a certain view exists. This could be used to display alternate views or used when developing a package to verify that certain views exist. We can use the exists() method on the ViewClass class:

ViewClass.exists('errors/404')

This will check is the template at resources/templates/errors/404.html exists. We can also check if global templates exist by prepending a forward slash:

ViewClass.exists('/masonite/errors/404')

An entire use case as code may look something like:

def show(self, ViewClass):
    if ViewClass.exists('errors/404'):
        return view('errors/404')
    
    return view('/some/package/404')