Luca Ubiali Web Developer

This episode is about adding helper methods to the form function to call prompts directly instead of through a callback.

The approach is: alter one test to use the desired methods (which don’t exist yet), see it fail, do a quick&dirty code change to see it go back to green.

The initial implementation uses the magic __call method inside FormBuilder like this:

 1public function __call(string $prompt, array $arguments)
 2{
 3    $prompt = "\\Laravel\\Prompts\\{$prompt}";
 4 
 5    if(! function_exists($prompt)) {
 6        throw new BadFunctionCallException("The prompt [{$prompt}] does not exist.");
 7    }
 8 
 9    return $this->add(function () use ($prompt, $arguments) {
10        return $prompt(...$arguments);
11    });
12}

The flaw of the implementation above is that we don’t have IDE support for any of the form methods (text, select, etc).

To get around it there are a couple options:

use class annotation to list the methods available similarly to how is done with facades
actually implement the methods and wrap them around the _call() method

The second option is the one chosen as the first one doesn’t seem to save much of the work anyway.

Turns out that implementation is pretty simple:

 1public function intro(string $message): self
 2{
 3    return $this->callPrompt("\\Laravel\\Prompts\\intro", get_defined_vars());
 4}
 5 
 6protected function callPrompt(string $prompt, array $arguments): self
 7{
 8    if(! function_exists($prompt)) {
 9        throw new BadFunctionCallException("The prompt [{$prompt}] does not exist.");
10    }
11 
12    return $this->add(function () use ($prompt, $arguments) {
13        return $prompt(...$arguments);
14    });
15}
16 
17public function __call(string $prompt, array $arguments)
18{
19    $prompt = "\\Laravel\\Prompts\\{$prompt}";
20 
21    return $this->callPrompt($prompt, $arguments);
22}

Bonus from this lesson is how to squash all the WIP commits created along the way. I do use WIP commits a lot, so this is a card I’ll play soon on my projects.

get the commit hash of the first WIP commit
git reset —soft <hash>
1. this un-dos all the changes locally, but because of the —soft flag, all changes to the files are still present
git add . && git commit -m “some meaningful message“
git push -f

How to Contribute to Open Source - 12 and 13/13 - Implementing Feedback: Part 2