Persisting saved listings

The mechanism for persisting saved listings is as follows: when a listing is toggled in the frontend app, we trigger an AJAX request that POSTs the ID to a route on the backend. This route calls a controller that will update the model:

Figure 9.9. Persisting saved listings

Let's now implement this mechanism.

Creating an API route

We'll begin on the server side and add a route for the frontend to POST listing IDS to. We'll need to add the auth middleware so that only authenticated users can access this route (we'll discuss the meaning of :api shortly).

routes/api.php:

...

Route::post('/user/toggle_saved', 'UserController@toggle_saved')
  ->middleware('auth:api')
;

Since this is an API route, its full path will be /api/user/toggle_saved. We haven't yet created the controller that this route calls, UserController, so let's do that now:

$ php artisan make:controller UserController

In this new controller, we'll add the toggled_saved handling method. Since this is an HTTP...