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silverstripe-api

A facade pattern API implementation for SilverStripe using interfaces and optionally Swagger.

Introduction

This is an opinionated package that implements a SilverStripe API with the following features:

• Each API node is described in a PHP interface file.
• The API is abstracted from your SilverStripe data structure.

You can structure your API in whatever way makes the most logical sense to its consumers: this is the facade pattern.

• Optional integration with a Swagger UI instance.
• An optional stub file implementation of each interface for testing.
• The real world implementation of each interface can be assigned to any (one) class.

In many cases the class implementing an interface could be an existing Page Controller, but you're entirely free to have a separate class purely for implementing the API interface.

This package is being developed progressively by the Govt.nz team, and features are being added as they're required for our own project.

This means that some desirable features have not yet been implemented.

OAuth and permissions checking, for example, will only be added when we need them ourselves.

Quick start

The /resources/data_dir subdirectory within this module contains interface samples.

1. Copy the entire subdirectory to a suitable location (see API data below).
2. Run dev/build.
3. Run dev/tasks/ApiRebuildDefinitionsTask
4. In a web browser, type [WEBROOT]/api/v1/section/list ... you should see a correctly formatted response.

Use Swagger-UI or manually browse the assets/api/v1/swagger.json file to learn the other available API requests.

Configuration

API definitions

silverstripe-api allows you to break your API definition into blocks distributed across multiple files.

It's not mandatory to split up your API definition: if you wish, you can write it as a single block. But splitting it up improves maintainability, and the dev task API: Rebuild definitions will still generate a single swagger.json file for each API version.

However you structure your API definition, it needs to be

1. standard JSON,
2. aligned with the Swagger 2.0 specification, and
3. contained in mulit-line comment blocks:

Unlike a regular JSON file, you can include // comments in your API definitions (but don't use /* */ comments). These // comments will be ignored by the dev task that generates the swagger.json output. The dev task will assume that each chunk of JSON is a top-level element within the Swagger definition: the provided examples demonstrate this.

Swagger JSON file

The dev task API: Rebuild definitions takes the JSON fragments from each interface and builds them into a single swagger.json file.

By default the resulting swagger.json file is saved in /assets/api, but you can change that with a .yml config setting:

And if you're integrating govtnz/swagger-ui with this API module, this path must be externally accessible.

Definitions File

Each API directory must have a file which defines properties that are common across all the interface nodes.

There are two useful variables available within this text file which can make your API definitions more portable between dev, test and production servers:

You can use getHost to automatically populate the "host" key:

You can use getProtocol to automatically populate the "schemes" array:

It's recommended that you copy and modify the existing resources/base.txt file to kick-start your own API development.

Tests

Automated tests can be written to exercise each interface and its stub file. These can be stored in the /tests subdirectory.

Each file in the stubs directory implements an API interface using static data. It is invoked in one of two circumstances:

1. When a test parameter is added to an API request, for example &test=true.
2. When there is no other implementation of an API interface.

Stub files are not mandatory, but they're useful for testing as their responses never change.

API Documentation

There are several useful functions in the ApiController:

• caseCamel($field) ensures $field is in camelCase.
• caseRequest($field) ensures $field is in the case specified in the request (default camelCase). Simple, one word field names are the same in camelCase and snake_case, but more complex field names can be passed through this function when generating your output.
• caseSnake($field) ensures $field is in snake_case.
• date3339toDB($input) converts an RFC3339 timestamp (2015-06-28T00:00:00+12:00) to MySQL format (2015-06-28 00:00:00).
• dateDBto3339($input) converts a MySQL timestamp (2015-06-28 00:00:00) to RFC3339 format (2015-06-28T00:00:00+12:00).
• formatOutput() returns an array containing two nodes: the query total, count and offset; the output data previously assigned to output.
• logAdd($text) populates the controller's internal log; sometimes useful for debugging.
• logGet() returns the controller's internal log as an array; sometimes useful for debugging.
• param($name) returns either the request parameter $name, or an empty string if this doesn't exist.
• setError($params) takes an array containing a status value and one or more error messages. It changes the controller's status and sets the error messages to be returned.
• xmlAdd($key, $parent, $label) registers an XML label for a given key|parent combination. An asterisk * can be used to denote a numeric value. Registering labels is only necessary for exceptions to the general rule, which is that XML label plurals will be created by adding an "s". However, one important use case is one-dimensional arrays, which will have a numeric key. The default behaviour is to convert any numeric key to "item" to prevent the XML breaking, but it's nicer to have a context-specific label.

Implementation

Your implementation code can:

• Rely on field names being in camelCase.
• Retrieve request parameters from the controller's param() function.
• Convert request and response dates using date3339toDB() and dateDBto3339().
• Register labels for XML nodes with xmlAdd().
• Call the controller's setError() function if you are unable to process the request.

Your implementation must:

• Call caseRequest() for any output field that is more than a simple one word name.
• Assign generated data to the controller's output property as an array.
• Set the controller's pronoun property if the type of the output data is not the same as the base type of the API node.

For example, the API method organisation/sector returns a list of organisation sectors, not a list of organisations. In this instance set pronoun to sector so the output is appropriately described.

Swagger integration

There is a companion package, govtnz/swagger-ui, which forks Swagger UI and makes it easy to include in a SilverSripe project.

See the documentation within this companion Swagger package for more details.