README

Provides Laravel 4 integration with knplabs/knp-menu.

This package is a fork of an existing package neatqc/knp-menu that appears to no longer be updated and 60% of the work has come from this developer.

Features

• All KnP-menu features
• Laravel syntax
• Laravel Facade support
• Blade templating language support
• Laravel routing support

Installation

Install the package

You can simply add this laravel package since it's register on packagist.

Execute this line in your terminal to install it with composer.

$ composer require 'hailwood/knp-menu-laravel4:~1.0'

Add the service provider

In app.php add Hailwood\KnpMenu\KnpMenuServiceProvider to your providers array.

Add the facade

In app.php add 'Menu' => 'Hailwood\KnpMenu\Facades\Menu' to your aliases array.

Add the menus directory

We need a new directory in the app path to store the menus. Create a new directory in your app directory called menus by default this should look like /app/menus.

Publish the config file

If we want to customize the menus we need to publish the config file. Run the command below which will give you a configuration file at /app/config/packages/hailwood/knp-menu-laravel4/config.php that you can edit.

$ php artisan config:publish hailwood/knp-menu-laravel4

Configuration Options

view

The name of the view to use as a template to render the menu. By default it uses /vendor/hailwood/knp-menu-laravel4/src/views/default.blade.php.

Feel free to copy this file to your views directory. Make the changes you need and update the value in the configuration file.

The view can be changed at runtime by calling ->setExtra('view', 'view.name') on the root menu object or by passing view' => 'view.name in an array as the second parameter of the render method.

charset

The charset to use when rendering the menus. We use UTF-8 by default as it provides the largest character set but if your pages are using a different charset then you'll want to change this.

renderers

An array of rendering engines we can use to parse the above templates.

default_renderer

The default renderer to use to parse the above template, if it is not changed we will just use this. Since this is a Laravel 4 integration package we have set this to the sensible default of blade/

Using predefined menus

Menus can be predefined in the app/menus directory in files that follow the MenuNameMenu.php naming convention.

These menus follow the general stub of:

<?php
use Hailwood\KnpMenu\MenuBuilder;

class MenuNameMenu extends MenuBuilder
{

    /**
     * Returns an instance of the menu created by the builder.
     *
     * @return \Knp\Menu\ItemInterface
     */
    public function create()
    {
        $menu = $this->factory->createItem('root');

        return $menu;
    }
}

But the easiest way to generate these menus is using the power of artisan:

$ php artisan menu:make MenuName

The menu can be interacted with using any of the methods from the official KnpMenu documentation in the create() method.

Using the Facade

Existing menus can be interacted with using the Menu:: facade we registered earlier such as rendering the menu:

<?php

echo Menu::render('MenuName');

If you need to interact with the menu before you render it you can use Menu::get('MenuName') to fetch the menu, interact with it as above and then render it. As an example:

<?php

Menu::get('MenuName')->addChild('dog');
Menu::get('MenuName')->addChild('cat');
Menu::get('MenuName')->getChild('dog')->addChild('puppy');

echo Menu::render('MenuName');

Generating menus on the fly

We know that you are not always going to know what your menus are before you need them, or maybe you want to generate a menu that's used only in one view. It seems dirty to create placeholder menus incase you want to use them so instead we give you the ability to generate them on the fly.

<?php

Menu::get('IDontExist')->addChild('birds');

Hey that looks familiar! Yep, if get() is called with the name of a menu that does not exist we will create it for you right then and there!

HTML menu items

The blade render has 'allow_safe_labels' set to true which means that calling ->setExtra('safe_label', true) on any menu item will prevent the renderer from escaping the contents automatically meaning raw html can be used.

The menu and routes

This package is tightly integrated with the Laravel routes. Instead of specifying a uri on the menu items specify an action or a route in the route key and we will do the rest. This supports controller actions or named routes.

<?php

$menuItem
     ->addChild('Controller Action', array('route' => 'method@controller'))
     ->addChild('Named Route', array('route' => 'some.named.route'))
;

This allows us to also correctly mark which route is the currently active menu item.

More documentation coming soon!