hampel/alerts

Laravel package for managing session messages and alerts in view responses

Alerts for Laravel

This package provides session-driven alerts for Laravel and provides alert templates for both Bootstrap and Foundation based front-end frameworks.

By Simon Hampel

Installation

To install through composer, run the following command:

composer require hampel/alerts

If you want to change the default Alert configuration or views, first publish them using the command:

$ php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Hampel\Alerts\AlertServiceProvider"

The config file can then be found in config/alerts.php, and the views in resources/views/vendor/alerts

Usage

The alerts functionality is based around two classes - the first is an AlertManager class, which you can access in your code via the Alert facade (or via the container $app['alerts']). The AlertManager class uses a Laravel MessageBag to store alert a collection of alerts, grouped by alert key (warning, error, success, etc).

Once you have finished adding alerts, you can then "flash" them to the session so that the alert messages are then available after a page redirect.

At this point, the second part of the functionality comes into play. The package provides a view composer, which waits for a particular view to be rendered and then executes, injecting the stored alert information which is retrieved from the session. The alerts are essentially rendered as a series of sub-views which are inserted into the base view using a configurable variable.

We can easily add alerts to the AlertManager using the built-in functionality:

Alert::add('error', 'An error message');

There are four alert levels provided by default: info, warning, error, success. Note that any alert level passed to the add function which is not in the configured list of alert levels, will be ignored when rendering the view.

You can add a message to the AlertManager using a shorthand function corresponding to the configured alert levels:

Alert::error('An error message');
Alert::success('Operation succeeded');

If you prefer to use the language translation files for your messages, you can simply specify a translation key and the AlertManager will substitute the corresponding language entry and optionally apply any replacements too. Note that this only works if you use the shorthand functions to add your messages.

Alert::success('auth.login.success');
Alert::error('validation.accepted', array('attribute' => 'terms'));

Alternatively, you could apply the translation yourself:

Alert::add('success', Lang::get('auth.login.success'));
Alert::error(Lang::get('validation.accepted', array('attribute' => 'terms')));

You can retrieve the underlying MessageBag implementation and merge an existing MessageBag.

$mybag = new MesageBag();
// add messages to your messagebag

// now get the alert message bag
$alerts = Alert::getMessageBag();

// merge in our messages
$alerts->merge($mybag);

// flash the messages to the session
Alert::flash();

To pass the alert messages to a view response, you will need to flash the data to the session.

You can do this in several ways - the AlertManager class provides a flash function, which sets the session key for you automatically, or you could do it as part of a redirect response. If not using the built-in flash function, make sure you specify the name of the session key used in the config file 'alerts::session_key', or use the helper function Alerts::getSessionKey():

// flash the messages to the session - this is the easiest way to do it
Alert::success('Operation succeeded')->flash();

// alternatively, return a redirect response and let Laravel flash the messages
return Redirect::to('myroute')->with(Alert::getSessionKey(), Alert::error('There was a problem')->getMessageBag()->getMessages());

// you can always just do it all manually and not use the AlertManager at all!
$messages = new MessageBag;
$messages->add('info', Lang::get('something.happened.info'));
Session::flash(Config::get('alerts::session_key', $messages->getMessages());

The package provides a view composer which automatically renders alerts whenever the view is called. There are several ways to do this.

By default, there is a Blade template alerts.blade.php which you can include in your base view. The view composer is configured by default to watch this view and render the alerts whenever this view is rendered. To use, simply @include the template in your view:

@include('alerts::alerts')

If you prefer to do it yourself, you can change the configuration of the view composer to watch a different view, perhaps even your layouts.base view. The composer will generate the alert data and bind it to the configured variable name, which you can then simply echo out in your view.

There are templates provided for both Bootstrap and Foundation, although Foundation is the default - you'll need to change the configuration setting if you use Bootstrap. Alternatively, you can provide your own view template to use to render each alert message. Refer to the configuration file for more information on what the settings do.