Have you ever stuck in a situation which a lot of parameters should be send to your API? and you must create tons of queries based on them? If your answer is yes, do not stop reading!

First of all, if you haven’t read This article about Eloquent filters before, I strongly advise you to take a look at it. In the mentioned article you will learn how to make advance query filters for your Eloquent model.

Also, You may need a secure filter. Secure filters will authorize the user for applying a given filter, which you can find the related article here.

Now, what if your Laravel project is not following default directory structure?

Define Filters Per Domain/Module

In a small Laravel project, you can use the default architecture (MVC) and its respective directory structure as below:

.
├── app
│   ├── Console
├── EloquentFilters // Default directory for filters
│   └── Product
│       ├── PriceMoreThanFilter.php
│   └── User
│       ├── AgeMoreThanFilter.php
│       └── GenderFilter.php
└── Exceptions
│   ├── Http
│   │   ├── Controllers
│   │   ├── Middleware
│   │   └── Requests
│   └── Providers
├── bootstrap
├── config
├── database
├── public
├── resources
├── routes
├── storage

And you can using EloquentBuilder like this:

But when your project grows by the time, the default structure is not enough. Eventually, this problem leads you to use a different architecture (i.e. Domain-Driven-Desgin, HMVC, …) or modifying current one. Therefore changing the directory structure in inevitable. Take a look at this one:

.
├── app
├── bootstrap
├── config
├── database
├── Domains
│   ├── Product
│   │   ├── database
│   │   │   └── migrations
│   │   ├── src
│   │       ├── Filters //Custom directory for Product model filters
│   │       │   └── PriceMoreThanFilter.php
│   │       ├── Entities
│   │       ├── Http
│   │          └── Controllers
│   │       ├── routes
│   │       └── Services
│   ├── User
│   │   ├── database
│   │   │   └── migrations
│   │   ├── src
│   │       ├── Filters //Custom directory for User model filters
│   │       │   └── AgeMoreThanFilter.php
│   │       ├── Entities
│   │       ├── Http
│   │          └── Controllers
│   │       ├── routes
│   │       └── Services
...

In this week, EloquentBuilder v2.0 has been released. In this version a new setFilterNamespace method added to the package to let you create custom filters “per domain/module” by setting filters namespace of the fly.

Now we can use filters for each model as below:

Conclusion

Dealing with API incoming parameters is a tedious job, so getting help from a black box package helps you to handle them without any concern and complexity. Furthermore, now there is a possibility to use this advantage in larger projects with different structures.

Special thanks to 50bhan for this awesome PR:

Add domain/module support #53

50bhan posted on Dec 29, 2019

With this feature, now we can how multiple filters in multiple directories to support domain/module directory structure. For detailed information, please read the documentation (customize-per-domain/module section).

This PR will closed issue #51

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