CRUDdy By Design by Adam Wathan: Summary, Examples, Opinions

Back in 2017, Adam Wathan made a great talk at Laracon called CRUDdy By Design, which has been recommended and reshared online for years. I decided to summarize it in text form, so instead of watching all 40 minutes, you could read this quicker, also with more examples and my own opinion.

First, I do recommend watching the full video anyway, embedded below.

Let's consider this article just a "compact summary", but if you want the full version with details, those 40 minutes are still worth it.

And before you ask: yes, that video is from 2017. And yes, it's still hugely relevant, despite some small syntax changes.

The Main Point: Everything is CRUD

Let's get straight to the primary point of Adam's talk.

Instead of creating custom non-resourceful methods in Controllers, you should create separate new Controllers with resourceful methods.

A typical example would be a PodcastController which has typical methods like index(), store(), and others, and you want to add a new method subscribe().

The problem with the subscribe() method is that it is a custom action: with adding those, such Controllers may soon grow too big and get hard to read/maintain.

Instead, according to Adam, you should create a SubscriptionController or PodcastSubscriptionController with the method store().

If we limit each Controller to only CRUDdy methods, it's easier to maintain.

CRUDdy methods are the same ones from Route::resource() in Resource Controllers:

• index()
• create()
• store()
• show()
• edit()
• update()
• destroy()

In other words, if you want to create a method that is not in the list above, there's a chance of better creating a new separate Controller with one of those methods above, thinking about which of those 7 methods fits best.

Or, even shorter, every Controller should be a Resource Controller.

Repeating the same thing in Adam's words: Never Write Custom Actions.

Three Examples From Adam's Talk

Notice: I will be rephrasing/summarizing examples a bit, and will not go 100% with the video.

Example 1. Nested Resource Controllers

Let's take a look at this example:

 1class PodcastController extends Controller {
 2    public function index() { /* ... */ }
 3 
 4    public function create() { /* ... */ }
 5 
 6    // ...
 7 
 8    public function listEpisodes($id) {
 9        // list episodes of a specific podcast
10    }
11}

Then, in the Routes...