Defining Breadcrumbs

• Introduction
• Static Pages
• Parent Links
• Dynamic Titles and Links
• Nested Categories

#Introduction

Breadcrumbs will usually correspond to actions or types of a page. For each breadcrumb, you specify a name, the breadcrumb title and the URL to link it to. Since these are likely to change dynamically, you do this in a closure, and pass in any variables you need into the closure.

#Static Pages

The most simple breadcrumb is probably going to be your homepage, which could look something like this:

use Rawilk\Breadcrumbs\Facades\Breadcrumbs;
use Rawilk\Breadcrumbs\Support\Generator;

Breadcrumbs::for('home', fn (Generator $trail) => $trail->push('Home', route('home')));

{note} In the example above, a PHP 7.4 arrow function is used, but you are free to use regular style closures as well.

{tip} In the example above, $trail is type-hinted to Rawilk\Breadcrumbs\Support\Generator, but you are free to use your own generator class if you want (be sure to define it in the config), and you also don't need to type-hint it if you don't want to.

When you call $trail->push($title, $url) inside the closure, it adds a breadcrumb link for the page.

For generating a URL, you can use any of the standard Laravel URL-generation methods, including:

• url('path/to/route') (URL::to())
• secure_url('path/to/route')
• route('route-name') or route('route-name', 'param') or route('route-name', ['param1', 'param2']) (URL::route())
• action('controller@action') (URL::action())
• Or just pass a string URL (http://www.example.com)

This example would be rendered like this:

{!! Breadcrumbs::render('home') !!}

And results in this output:

Home

#Parent Links

This is another static page, but it has a parent link before it:

use Rawilk\Breadcrumbs\Facades\Breadcrumbs;
use Rawilk\Breadcrumbs\Support\Generator;

Breadcrumbs::for('blog', fn (Generator $trail) => $trail->parent('home')->push('Blog', route('blog')));

{note} It works by calling the closure for the home breadcrumb defined above via parent().

It would be rendered like this:

{!! Breadcrumbs::render('blog') !!}

And results in this output:

Home / Blog

{note} The default templates do not create a link for the last breadcrumb (the one for the current page), even when a URL is specified. You can override this by creating your own template or overriding the package's pre-defined templates. See Custom Templates for more details.

#Dynamic Titles and Links

This is a dynamically generated page pulled from the database:

Breadcrumbs::for('post', fn (Generator $trail, $post) => $trail->parent('blog')->push($post->title, route('post', $post)));

The $post object (usually an Eloquent model, but could be anything) would simply be passed in from the view:

{!! Breadcrumbs::render('post', $post) !!}

The output from this would be:

Home / Blog / Post Title

{tip} You can pass in multiple parameters if necessary.

#Nested Categories

If you have nested categories or other special requirements, you can call $trail->push() multiple times.

Breadcrumbs::for('category', function (Generator $trail, $category) {
    $trail->parent('blog');

    foreach ($category->parents as $parent) {
        $trail->push($parent->title, route('category', $parent->id));
    }

    $trail->push($category->title, route('category, $category->id));
});

Alternatively, you could make a recursive function like this:

Breadcrumbs::for('category', function (Generator $trail, $category) {
    if ($category->parent) {
        $trail->parent('category', $category->parent);
    } else {
        $trail->parent('blog');
    }

    $trail->push($category->title, route('category', $category->slug));
});

Both would be rendered like this:

{!! Breadcrumbs::render('category', $category) !!}

The result could end up like this:

Home / Blog / Grandparent Category / Parent Category / Category Title