Laravel 4, group prefix requires changing route names. Really?

Question

So I've been working on an app that lived on the domain root and now has to work on /admin. So URLs like domain.com/[resource] should now be domain.com/admin/[resource]. I didn't thought this very well before since I assumed that this had to be a very easy fix on Laravel. After all, that's one of the main reasons for not hardcoding routes, right?

So my routes.php file looked something like:

Route::group(['before' => 'auth'], function() {
    Route::resource('books', 'BooksController');
    ... more resources here ...
});

Going through the docs I found that 'prefix' => 'admin' would do the trick:

Route::group(['prefix' => 'admin', 'before' => 'auth'], function() {
    Route::resource('books', 'BooksController');
    ... more resources here ...
});

But it turns out that every route name get's changed from books.{action} to admin.books.{action} which requires me to change the whole app. Regexing would be dangerous and doing it manually would be annoying. Laravel was supposed to help with this! Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

This is untested, but after looking on the documentation for resource controllers it seems as though you can manually set their names. I'm assuming Laravel automatically namespaces grouped resource controller routes to avoid name collision, but you can override this to avoid going back through the rest of your app (just beware of future name collision):

Route::resource(
    'books',
    'BooksController',
    array(
        'names' => array(
            'index'   => 'photo.index',
            'create'  => 'photo.create',
            'store'   => 'photo.store',
            'show'    => 'photo.show',
            'edit'    => 'photo.edit',
            'update'  => 'photo.update',
            'destroy' => 'photo.destroy',
        )
    )
);

---

Shorter Method:

Just define a quick method at the top of your routes.php file to shorten up this repetitive task of creating an array of route names. Still not the greatest solution, but I believe its the only thing you can do with how Laravel has this set up.

function createRouteNames($resource) {
    $names = array();
    $types = ['index', 'create', 'store', 'show', 'edit', 'update', 'destroy'];
    foreach($types as $type) {
        $names[$type] = $resource . '.' . $type;
    }
    return $names;
}

Route::resource('books', 'BooksController', ['names' => createRouteNames('books')]);

Note: [] === array() and may not be supported on older PHP's, meaning you may need to replace them with the old syntax.