README

HelpSpace is a beautiful help desk service. One of its features is that it can display a sidebar with extra information about the person that opened a ticket.

HelpSpace sends a request to your app to get the HTML content to populate that sidebar. Our package makes it easy to validate if an incoming request from HelpSpace is valid and allows you to respond to it.

When installed, this is how you can respond to an incoming request from HelpSpace.

use Spatie\HelpSpace\Http\Requests\HelpSpaceRequest;

HelpSpace::sidebar(function(HelpSpaceRequest $request) {
    $user = User::firstWhere('email', $request->email())
    
    if (! $user) {
        return 'No user found';
    }
    
    // any view of your own in which you render the html
    // to be displayed at HelpSpace
    return view('help-space.sidebar', compact('user'));
})

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Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/laravel-help-space

To publish the config file and to create the app/Providers/HelpSpaceServiceProvider.app class in your app, run this command.

php artisan help-space:install

This is the contents of the published config file at config/help-space.php app:

return [
    /*
     * The secret used to verify if the incoming HelpSpace secret is valid
     */
    'secret' => env('HELP_SPACE_SECRET'),

    /*
     * The package will automatically register this route to handle incoming
     * requests from HelpSpace.
     *
     * You can set this to `null` if you prefer to register your route manually.
     */
    'url' => '/help-space',

    /*
     * These middleware will be applied on the automatically registered route.
     */
    'middleware' => [
        Spatie\HelpSpace\Http\Middleware\IsValidHelpSpaceRequest::class,
        'api',
    ],
];

Next, In your .env file, you must set a new env-variable called HELP_SPACE_SECRET to a random string. At HelpSpace you must navigate to the "Custom Ticket sidebar" in the integration settings. There you must input that random string. This secret will be used to verify if an incoming request is really coming from HelpSpace.

The package will automatically register a route at /help-space. This route can be customized.

Usage

If you ran the install command from the section above, then your application a HelpSpaceServiceProvider.php service provider in app/Providers. This is the content.

namespace App\Providers;

use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
use Spatie\HelpSpace\Facades\HelpSpace;
use Spatie\HelpSpace\Http\Requests\HelpSpaceRequest;

class HelpSpaceServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function register()
    {
        HelpSpace::sidebar(function(HelpSpaceRequest $request) {        
            return "HTML about {$request->email()}";
        });
    }
}

The callable in sidebar will be executed whenever HelpSpace sends a request to your app. The email() method of the given HelpSpaceRequest will contain the email address of the person that opened the ticket.

Instead of returning a string, you can also return a view.

HelpSpace::sidebar(function(HelpSpaceRequest $request) {
    $user = User::firstWhere('email', $request->email());
    
    return view('your-own-view', compact('user'));        
}

Preview the content of the sidebar

When working on the view that returns the HTML of the sidebar, it can be handy to preview it locally, instead of letting HelpScout sending requests.

To see the HTML for a given email address, you can use the help-space:render-sidebar command.

# returns the HTML for the given email address
php artisan help-space:render-sidebar --email=john@example.com

Customizing the registered route

The package will automatically register a route at /help-space. You can change this value in the help-space.php config file.

Alternatively, you can register your own route.

First, you must set the url key in the help-space.php config file to null

Next, you must add this to your routes file, preferably routes/api.php so that your app doesn't start a session when a new request comes in from HelpSpace.

// in a routes file, preferable in routes/api.php

Route::helpSpaceSidebar('your-custom-segment');

The above route will register a route with URL https://yourdomain.com/api/your-custom-segment (when you registered it in the api.php routes file.)

Testing

composer test

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information on what has changed recently.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security Vulnerabilities

Please review our security policy on how to report security vulnerabilities.

Credits

• Freek Van der Herten
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.