The Command Pattern

After installing Laravel Jetstream I noticed the creation of a new App\Actions folder containing a handful of classes. Intrigued I had a poke around and saw that each class has a short action based name such as CreateNewUser and contains a single public method for the action being requested e.g create(...).

This feels like felt like an implementation of the Command pattern which is similar but not the same as how I often use Laravel's custom form requests.

I believe both JetStream and Fortify are using these as a way of better giving control to host project maintainers because it's very easy to modify behaviour when the functionality is being loaded from your application's folder directly rather than hidden away inside the vendor folder.

As mentioned, I have written an extension to the Laravel FormRequest that gives me three abstract classes:

• ActionRequest
• LookupRequest
• PersistFormRequest

These three abstracts provide an interface for execute, lookup or persist public methods, that keeps calling consistent.

For example, I have an PlayerEnqueueResearch class that extends PersistFormRequest and a PlayerPauseResearch class that extends ActionRequest. Enqueuing a research item is done via POST while pausing is done via a DELETE request.

This makes for some nice skinny controller functions:

public function pauseResearch(PlayerPauseResearch $request): JsonResponse|RedirectResponse  
{  
    $request->execute();  
  
    return $request->expectsJson()  
        ? new JsonResponse(null, 204)  
        : back();  
}

public function enqueueResearch(PlayerEnqueueResearch $request): JsonResponse|RedirectResponse  
{  
    return $request->expectsJson()  
        ? new JsonResponse($request->persist(), 201)  
        : back();  
}

When I first saw the action classes it did cross my mind that I should refactor my project into using its pattern however upon reflection I can see that I am already doing so and would end up rewriting some form validation and authorization logic that I get for free with extending the Laravel FormRequest.