Help for Others - Using Blade Syntax with a Framework (like bootstrap)

For those of you who watching this, that might want to have the ability to use the blade syntax for the form builder in combination with a framework like Bootstrap. Here are the steps.

1. Create a new provider (you can use php artisan for this) In my case, I created one title BootstrapFormServiceProvider.

2. In the boot method of the provider specify the new type of element you want to create and what it expects. (i.e. I wanted to use Bootstrap so I created a newStatic method for bsText using the syntax below.

Form::component('bsText', 'components.form.text', ['name', 'value' => null, 'attributes' => []]);

1. Register the service provider by editing the app.php file in the confit folder. This is done by adding something like the below to the bottom of 'providers':

App\Providers\BootstrapFormServiceProvider::class

1. run composer update

2. Create the file that specifies how the bsText method you created in step 2 will work. In my case, the file will be stored at 'components.form.text' (what we specified in step 2) and will contain the following.

<fieldset class="form-group"> {{ Form::label($name, null, ['class' => 'control-label']) }} {{ Form::text($name, $value, array_merge(['class' => 'form-control'], $attributes)) }} </fieldset>

1. Use the method in your view. In my case, I added this inside of my form:

{{ Form::bsText('title') }}

1. Enjoy the benefits! Now just from typing that one line of code you will get the bootsrtap html needed for an input. Here's the html that will be generated!

<fieldset class="form-group"> <label for="title" class="control-label">Title</label> <input class="form-control" name="title" type="text" id="title"> </fieldset>

Hope this helps!

You can find more information on the laravel collective site:

https://laravelcollective.com/docs/5.2/html#custom-components