How to pass variables to another controller in Laravel

Question

I have a product controller and a header controller. When loading the product controller, I use Route::forward() to load my header controller.

return View::make('frontend.catalogue.product.view')
            ->with('head', Route::forward("GET", "frontend/page/head"));

I can then echo out the header on the page by doing:

<?php echo $head; ?>

Simple. However, I want to pass information to the header controller which will be defined in the product controller, such as the page title or meta description.

Ideally I would either be able to pass an array to the header, or have an instantiated class somewhere which both route requests have access to.

I've tried instantiating a library in my base controller constructor, however this gets re-instantiated on each Route::forward() request so any properties I set can't be read in the next forward.

The only way I can think of doing this is using session data, but that doesn't seem like it would be the best way to do it.

The header does need to be a controller and not just a view composer, as it deals with it's own models etc.

I know Laravel doesn't do HMVC, which would be the ideal solution, and I know there are bundles for HMVC, but I'm curious how you would approach this the Laravel way.

(Using Laravel 3.2 btw)

Answer 1

Managed to get this working how I want. For others interested:

Instead of using

return View::make('frontend.catalogue.product.view')
             ->with('head', Route::forward("GET", "frontend/page/head"));

I now do the following in the main request controller:

    $document = array(
        'meta_title' => 'My Title',
        'meta_description' => 'My Description',
    );

    // Output the view
    return View::make('frontend.catalogue.category.view')
                    ->with('head', Controller::call('frontend.page.head@index', array($document)));

and in my frontend/page/head controller, I have the following:

public function action_index($document = array()) {

       $meta_title = isset($document['meta_title']) ? $document['meta_title'] : 'Default Title';

       return View::make('frontend.page.head')
                ->with('meta_title', $meta_title);

}

Props to the friendly guys on the Laravel IRC for helping with this