Controller Basics

In this episode, we tie together Routes, Models, and Views by introducing the Controller — the final piece of Laravel’s MVC architecture.

You’ll learn how to:
✅ Create controllers using php artisan make:controller
✅ Organize request-handling logic into clean, reusable classes
✅ Connect routes to controller methods (actions)
✅ Implement GET and POST routes for taking a survey
✅ Apply route model binding and request/response patterns

We’ll also clean up a few loose ends before diving into survey submissions:
- Add default error pages
- Rename SurveyStatusType → SurveyStatus
- Guard routes against non-active surveys
- Add an index to hash in migrations
- Demonstrate booted() and enum casting in the Survey model
- Simplify the factory by removing hash logic

Copy these commands to follow along:
php artisan make:controller TakeSurveyController

Example routes:
- Route::get('/s/{survey:hash}', [TakeSurveyController::class, 'show'])->name('survey.show');
- Route::post('/s/{survey:hash}', [TakeSurveyController::class, 'store'])->name('survey.store');

📘 Resources
- Laravel Controllers Docs: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/controllers
- Laravel Routing Docs: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/routing
- Laravel Model Events Docs: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/eloquent#events
- Laravel Error Pages Docs: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/errors#http-exceptions
- Migration Modifications Docs: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/migrations#modifying-columns

#Laravel #PHP #WebDevelopment #MVC #Controllers #Routing #Eloquent #TekCasts #LearnToCode