In putting the Invoke library to use I noticed something. While I could tell it to check for groups and permissions on the current user and limit HTTP methods on the request, there were more complex things I needed to check that weren’t part of these defaults. Now, I could just extend invoke to include match types for everything I needed (injecting a custom match class based on my needs) but I wanted something a bit more generic that I could use to call my own logic and return the pass/fail result.

So, I added in the “object.callback” match type that allows you to call a static method in your own code and perform the evaluation yourself. Here’s how it works. Say you have this configuration in your routes.yml file:

/foo:
  protected: on
  callback: \App\MyUser::test

This tells Invoke that when the user requests the /foo URL, the protection should kick in. It then goes into the checks portion of the process. This sees the special callback option and looks the class and method to call. In this case, we’ve told it to try calling the test method \App\MyUser. This class needs to be autoloadable so that Invoke can directly call it and its static method. Yep, that’s right – it needs to be a static method but you’ll be provided with everything about the request in the incoming $data variable. Here’s what the method should look like:

public static function test(\Psecio\Invoke\Data $data)
{
  /* perform your evaluation here and return a boolean */
}

In the $data variable there, you’ll have access to the context of the application via some object properties:

• user: The current InvokeUser instance (ideally where your user lies too)
• resource: The resource that was requested (includes access to the requested URI)
• route: This is the route match from Invoke’s configuration the current request matches. This contains the route regex match, the configuration options and any additional parameters passed along

For example, say you needed to get the parameters from the request to do further evaluation. You could fetch them through $data->resource->getParams() and get the associative array back.

Adding these callbacks makes the Invoke system a lot more flexible and allows you to create those custom match types without having to have whole other classes just to perform your checks.