UrlRoutable in Laravel 5

Laravel 5 includes a great new feature (biased as I may be) that I made the initial pull request for. It's the new Illuminate\Contracts\Routing\UrlRoutable interface to be used with Eloquent models. It makes generating routes just a little bit simpler and keeps your code DRYer. Let's take a look at how it works.

<?php namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Post extends Model
{
    //
}

Previously, if we wanted to route to a post we would need to do something like this.

// We have to pass the model's ID.
URL::route('posts.show', $post->id);

If we decided we'd rather use a post's slug instead of it's ID to make the site prettier we would need to change every URL on the site to reflect this.

URL::route('posts.show', $post->slug);

However, in Laravel 5 this is now handled by the model. The UrlRoutable contract includes a method called getRouteKeyName() which returns the model's key (usually 'id'). It means now you can simply pass the model to the route() method to get the URL generated.

// Works just the same as before.
URL::route('posts.show', $post);

And now, if you want to use a slug instead of the primary key you can simply override that method in your model.

<?php namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Post extends Model
{
    /**
     * Get the route key for the model
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function getRouteKeyName()
    {
        return 'slug';
    }
}