The Basics
Learn how to define, register, and customize Nova resources.
Introduction
Laravel Nova is a beautiful administration dashboard for Laravel applications. Of course, the primary feature of Nova is the ability to administer your underlying database records using Eloquent. Nova accomplishes this by allowing you to define a Nova “resource” that corresponds to each Eloquent model in your application.
Defining Resources
By default, Nova resources are stored in the app/Nova
directory of your application. You may generate a new resource using the nova:resource
Artisan command:
The most basic and fundamental property of a resource is its model
property. This property tells Nova which Eloquent model the resource corresponds to:
Freshly created Nova resources only contain an ID
field definition. Don’t worry, we’ll add more fields to our resource soon.
Nova contains a few reserved words which may not be used for resource names:
- Card
- Dashboard
- Field
- Impersonate
- Metric
- Resource
- Search
- Script
- Style
- Tool
Registering Resources
By default, all resources within the app/Nova
directory will automatically be registered with Nova. You are not required to manually register them.
Before resources are available within your Nova dashboard, they must first be registered with Nova. Resources are typically registered in your application’s app/Providers/NovaServiceProvider.php
file. This file contains various configuration and bootstrapping code related to your Nova installation.
As mentioned above, you are not required to manually register your resources; however, if you choose to do so, you may do so by overriding the resources
method of your NovaServiceProvider
.
There are two approaches to manually registering resources. You may use the resourcesIn
method to instruct Nova to register all Nova resources within a given directory. Alternatively, you may use the resources
method to manually register individual resources:
Once your resources are registered with Nova, they will be available in the Nova sidebar:
Dashboard
If you do not want a resource to appear in the sidebar, you may override the displayInNavigation
property of your resource class:
Customizing Resource Menus
You can customize the resource’s menu by defining a menu
method on your resource class:
Please refer to the documentation on menu customization for more information.
Grouping Resources
If you would like to separate resources into different sidebar groups, you may override the group
property of your resource class:
Resource Table Style Customization
Nova supports a few visual customization options for your resources.
Table Styles
Sometimes it’s convenient to show more data on your resource index tables. To accomplish this, you can use the “tight” table style option designed to increase the visual density of your table rows. To accomplish this, override the static $tableStyle
property or the static tableStyle
method on your resource class:
This will display your table rows with less visual height, enabling more data to be shown:
Tight Table Style
Column Borders
You can instruct Nova to display column borders by overriding the static $showColumnBorders
property or the static showColumnBorders
method on your resource class:
Setting this property to true
will instruct Nova to display the table with borders on every table item:
Table Column Borders
Resource Table Click Action
By default, when clicking on a resource table row, Nova will navigate to the detail view for the resource. However, you may want Nova to navigate to the edit form instead. You can customize this behavior by changing the clickAction
property on the resource’s class:
Choosing the select
option will select the resource row’s checkbox. The ignore
option instructs Nova to ignore click events altogether.
Eager Loading
If you routinely need to access a resource’s relationships within your fields, resource title, or resource subtitle, it may be a good idea to add the relationship to the with
property of your resource. This property instructs Nova to always eager load the listed relationships when retrieving the resource.
For example, if you access a Post
resource’s user
relationship within the Post
resource’s subtitle
method, you should add the user
relationship to the Post
resource’s with
property:
Resource Replication
Sometimes, you may want to create a new resource while using all of the data from an existing resource as a starting point. Nova’s resource replication feature does just that. After clicking the replicate button, you’ll be whisked away to a resource creation form with all of the replicated resource’s data hydrated into the form and ready for tweaking:
Resource Replication
To customize the replication model, you can override the replicate
method on the resource class:
Markdown
and Trix
fields that use the withFiles
method may not be replicated.
If you need to store a reference to the original resource’s ID, you may access the fromResourceId
value on the replication request. Typically, this value would be accessed from an event listener or observer that is listening for the model’s creating
event:
Resource Events
All Nova operations use the typical save
, delete
, forceDelete
, restore
Eloquent methods you are familiar with. Therefore, it is easy to listen for model events triggered by Nova and react to them. The easiest approach is to simply attach a Laravel model observer to a model:
If you would like to attach an observer whose methods are invoked only during Nova related HTTP requests, you may register observers using the make
method provided by the Laravel\Nova\Observable
class. Typically, this should be done within your application’s NovaServiceProvider
:
Alternatively, you can determine if the current HTTP request is serving a Nova related request within the Observer
itself using Nova’s whenServing
method:
Resource Hooks
Nova also allows you to define the following static methods on a resource to serve as hooks that are only invoked when the corresponding resource action is executed from within Laravel Nova:
afterCreate
afterUpdate
afterDelete
afterForceDelete
afterRestore
For example, you may want to send an email verification notification after a user has been created within Nova:
Preventing Conflicts
If a model has been updated since it was last retrieved by Nova, Nova will automatically respond with a 409 Conflict
HTTP status code and display an error message to prevent unintentional model changes. This may occur if another user updates the model after you have opened the “Edit” page on the resource. This feature is also known as the Nova “Traffic Cop”.
Disabling Traffic Cop
If you are not concerned with preventing conflicts, you can disable the Traffic Cop feature by setting the trafficCop
property to false
on a given resource class:
You may also override the trafficCop
method on the resource if you have more intense customization needs in order to determine if this feature should be enabled:
If you are experiencing issues with traffic cop you should ensure that your system time is correctly synchronized using NTP.
Resource Polling
Nova can automatically fetch the latest records for a resource at a specified interval. To enable polling, override the polling
property of your Resource class:
To customize the polling interval, you may override the pollingInterval
property on your resource class with the number of seconds Nova should wait before fetching new resource records:
Toggling Resource Polling
By default, when resource polling is enabled, there is no way to disable it once the page loads. You can instruct Nova to display a start / stop toggle button for resource polling by setting the showPollingToggle
property on your resource class to true
:
Nova will then display a clickable button that you may use to enable / disable polling for the resource:
Resource Polling
Redirection
Nova allows you to easily customize where a user is redirected after performing resource actions such as creating or updating a resource:
Behind the scenes, Nova’s redirect features use Inertia.js’s visit
method. Because of this, redirection is limited to paths within Laravel Nova. You may invoke the URL::remote
method to redirect to an external URL:
After Creating Redirection
You may customize where a user is redirected after creating a resource using by overriding your resource’s redirectAfterCreate
method:
After Updating Redirection
You may customize where a user is redirected after updating a resource using by overriding your resource’s redirectAfterUpdate
method:
After Deletion Redirection
You may customize where a user is redirected after deleting a resource using by overriding your resource’s redirectAfterDelete
method:
Pagination
Nova has the ability to show pagination links for your Resource listings. You can choose between three different styles: “simple”, “load-more”, and “links”, depending on your application’s needs:
Simple Pagination
Load-more Pagination
Links Pagination
By default, Nova Resources are displayed using the “simple” style. However, you may customize this to use either the load-more
or links
styles by changing the value of the pagination
configuration option within your application’s config/nova.php
configuration file:
Customizing Pagination
If you would like to customize the selectable maximum result amounts shown on each resource’s “per page” filter menu, you can do so by customizing the resource’s perPageOptions
property:
Alternatively, you can override the perPageOptions
method on your application’s base Resource
class, which is created when you install Nova:
Changing the value of perPageOptions
on your Resource
will cause Nova to fetch the number of resources equal to the first value in the perPageOptions
array.
Using the $perPageViaRelationship
property, you may also customize the number of resources displayed when a particular resource is displayed on another resource’s detail view as a relationship:
CSV Export
Occasionally you may need to export a group of resource records as a CSV file so that you can interact with the data in a spreadsheet application or import the data into another system. Thankfully, Nova includes built-in support for exporting resource data.
To get started, add the Laravel\Nova\Actions\ExportAsCsv
action to your Nova resource:
If you would like to allow the user to name the CSV file that is downloaded, you may invoke the nameable
method when registering the action:
If you would like to customize and format the fields that are included in the generated CSV, you may invoke the withFormat
method when registering the action:
Resource Index Search Debounce
You may wish to customize the search debounce timing of an individual resource’s index listing. For example, the queries executed to retrieve some resources may take longer than others. You can customize an individual resource’s search debounce by setting the debounce
property on the resource class:
Keyboard Shortcuts
You may press the C
key on a resource index to navigate to the “Create Resource” page. On the resource detail page, the E
key may be used to navigate to the “Update Resource” page.