How to access controller from other controller in Laravel?

Question

Maybe I'm doing this wrong alltogether. But I'm doing my first MVC in Laravel. Here is my setup.

The app is gonna download data from varoius sources and save to a database for output.

I have two controllers. One that saves data to the database and one that downloads data from instagram. In the Instagram-controller. I currently just output the data. I would like to save it using my save-controller instead.

Instagram controller:

class InstagramController extends BaseController {

public function read($q)
{
    $client_id = 'ea7bee895ef34ed08eacad639f515897';

    $uri = 'https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/'.$q.'/media/recent?client_id='.$client_id;
    $response = $this->sendRequest($uri);
    print_r(json_decode($response));
    //return json_decode($response);
}

public function sendRequest($uri){
    $curl = curl_init($uri);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
    $responses = curl_exec($curl);
    $responses = json_decode($responses);
    curl_close($curl);
    echo '<pre>';
    foreach ($responses->data as $data) {
        //0/{postid}/{url}/{author}/{content}
        $type = 0;
        $postid = $data->id;
        $url = $data->link;
        $author = $data->user->username;
        $content = $data->images->standard_resolution->url;


        echo $type.' '.$postid.' '.$url.' '.$author.' '.$content.'<br />';
    }
    //var_dump($responses->data);
    echo '</pre>';
    //return $response;
}

}

Save Controller:

class PostController extends BaseController {
public function save($type, $postid, $url, $author, $content)
{
    $post = new Post;
    $post->type = $type;
    $post->postid = $postid;
    $post->url = $url;
    $post->author = $author;
    $post->content = $content;
    try
    {
    $post->save();
    echo $post;
    }catch(Exception $e){
        throw new Exception( 'Already saved', 0, $e);
    }
   // 
}
}

Answer 1

Controllers are mapped to actions (one route perform one action). You can call a controller by calling his route.

Because getting images, and saving them are part of the same action (ie: same route), I recommend you to move that code to a library or helper (or why not a model, because you are retrieving and saving data)

Anyway, I don't get the reason why you are doing that in controllers. Controllers usually perform operations between models and the views. Fetching data from a webservice belong more to models than to controllers. In fact, I really recommend you to move that code to a library to be reusable later. Your controller must only have the responsibility of calling the library's read method to read the image, then saving it locally using a model.