During my talk at Laracon 2017, I shared some strategies I use to split large controllers into multiple small controllers.
The core idea is to try and stick to the 7 standard REST/CRUD actions in your controllers:
- Index
- Show
- Create
- Store
- Edit
- Update
- Destroy
Using this convention as a "rule" is a good way to force yourself to keep your controllers from becoming bloated, and can often lead to learning interesting new things about your domain.
For the presentation, I put together a demo app called "CastHacker" that showcases podcasts about software development. It's not a "real" app by any means (lots of imaginary features, no tests, etc.); it's just enough code to demonstrate the concepts from the presentation. Feel free to clone it and play with it locally if you like though.
I've written up each refactoring I shared in the presentation as a detailed pull request:
Tip 1: Give nested resources a dedicated controller Tip 2: Treat properties edited independently as separate resources Tip 3: Treat pivot models as their own resource Tip 4: Think of different states as different resources