How you return early matters inside listeners

Last week, I shared a couple examples where I discussed using logic inside a listener to return early if certain conditions were met.

But none of those tips shared code examples. I was discussing it as a high level concept.

A reader pointed out to me that you want to be careful in how you write that early return, because it can affect whether other listeners are triggered or not.

Inside the listener, if you return false; then other listeners for that event will not be triggered. This is useful behavior if you intenionally want to stop propagation of the event, but if you're only trying to bypass one listener, this is not what you'd want.

Instead, what I do, and what I had in mind when writing the previous tips was simply to return; with no value.

By default, Laravel stubs out listeners with a void return type, so this is the default behavior. You'd have to intentionally change the return type to false to get the behavior of stopping propagation (if you're using strict types).

Here to help,

Joel

P.S. Did you know we publish these tips in ebook form for easy offline reading and searching?