Laravel framework: Best Practice Register a user in model or controller workflow

Question

I'm reading through a lot of guides, tutorials on MVC and Laravel. Simple example, handling user registration. The majority of them suggest the something like the following:

User Model:

Attributes: id, name, email, password

UserController:

Method getRegister() // Show registration form
Method postRegister()

Further detail in postRegister() method of UserController

1. Gather User input
2. Validate against model
3. If fails, return to getRegister() with errors
4. If passes, try to register user (Hash password, use ORM to insert user to database)
5. If fails, return exception and redirect to appropriate page.
6. If passes, return success and redirect to appropriate page.

Example implementation: https://github.com/rydurham/L4withSentry

In this implementation, the Model is simply being used as an interface to the ORM, nothing more.

The Question:

Now I am not knocking the implementation posted above, because it shows a really good working example of how Cartalyst Sentry works... However, is this the best/appropriate way of registering the user?

Should the whole validation / hashing / registering etc... not be performed within the model? Then the model return success or failure to the Controller to act appropriately?

If you take a look at the UserController app/controllers/UserController.php, this is extremely Fat, whilst the User model app/models/User.php is very skinny.

e.g. Should the User model not have a registerUser() method which would perform most of the registration process?

At present, a user can register themselves, or an admin user would be able to register a user. As such, a bulk of controller code would need to be repeated for admin/user/register and login/register

If I am correct in my thoughts, can anybody point me in the direction of potentially Fat Model, Skinny Controller implementation so that I can understand more how they work?

Answer 1

You are right! When talking about the best practice of MVC (not only Laravel) you should keep your controller slim and all the application logic (including validation) should be kept in the model.

Respect Boundaries

Remember to respect responsibility boundaries. Controllers and routes serveas as mediator between HTTP and your application.When writing large applications, don’t clutter them up with your domain logic.

From the book: Laravel:From Apprentice To Artisan (By: TaylorOtwel Otwell). Check this detailed answer.

Answer 2

In my opinion, yes, a Model should deal with the process of validation and aware of the state of validity of itself.

And I believe it is for this reason Colby Rabideau made Ardent, it is a package that moves validation to the Model along with some other neat features in your Eloquent model. It is now in my must-have package for Laravel.

Most of the existing tutorials I've seen offer straight-forward usage of Validator object in their controller resulting in much fatter controller, something that I stay away from.