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Multi-format Response Object for Laravel

In some situations you may want to support multiple return formats (HTML, JSON, CSV, XLSX) for the one endpoint and controller. This package gives you a base class that helps you return different formats of the same data. It supports specifying the return format as a file extension or as an Accept header. It also allows you to have shared and format specific logic, all while sharing the same route and controller.

Installation

You can install using composer from Packagist

Getting started

This package is designed to help if you have ever created a controller that looks like this...

You might notice a few things about the above controller:

1. There is some initial shared logic between all the formats, i.e. preparing the query.
2. If the user is requesting the webpage, the CsvWriter is never used.
3. As we add more formats, we are going to no doubt be injecting more dependencies that are not needed in the other response types.
4. More response types also mean more checks in the if chain.
5. The web page also has format specific logic, i.e. it requires the $memberships collection, which is used (perhaps) to populate a dropdown on the webpage, but is not needed in the CSV download.

This package cleans up this style of controller. Let me show you how...

Cleaning up the controller

The first step to refactoring the controller is to replace the format specific logic with the response object. You will no doubt do this step last, but I think it is easier to demonstrate it this way.

You can pass values into the response object by passing an array of data to the static make method. This is similar to how you may already be sending view data view('users.index', ['some' => 'data']).

The response object

In order to support a particular response format, you need to add a corresponding response method. If you want to provide your blog posts in mp3 audio format, you would add a toMp3Response method to you response object.

You can type hint these methods and the dependencies will be resolved from the container. In our example we are supporting HTML and CSV formats.

You can see the toCsvResponse method has type hinted the CsvWriter. This dependency is only resolved when the request format is CSV. You can also magically access any of the data you passed into the make method as an attribute on the object e.g. $this->query.

That is all there is to it really. Below are some more detailed docs and features.

Detecting response format

The response object will automatically detect the requested response format by checking for a file extension on the request's url and will fallback to the Accept header if no extension is found. Under the hood we are using Symfony's MimeTypes class to detect the extension. We then fallback to Laravel's Request::format() method. The first matching mime type and first matching extension will be used.

You do not have to support file extensions. This is entirely in your control. If you only want to support the Accept header than set up your routing to not supportextensions.

Why file extensions?

It is pretty standard for an API to handle content negotiation with the Accept header. However it is often handy to be able to specify the response format with a file extension as well. This is probably most handy from a web interface where you can link the the same url but provide an extension to tell the server what format you want.

This pattern is used in a lot of places. A good example of this is Reddit. Append .json to any url on reddit and you will get a JSON formatted response.

See for yourself:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/laravel
• https://www.reddit.com/r/laravel.json

Response format methods

In order to support a format, you create a to{Format}Response method, where {Format} is the formats file extension. e.g.

• CSV: toCsvResponse()
• JSON: toJsonResponse()
• HTML: toHtmlResponse()
• XLSX: toXlsxResponse()

Dependency Injection

As mentioned previously, the format method will be called by the container, allowing you to resolve format specific dependencies from the container. As seen in the basic usage example, the html format has no dependencies, however the csv format has a CsvWriter dependency.

Default response format

It is possible to set a default response format, either from the calling controller, or from within the response object itself. This default format will be used if the url and the Accept header have no set value, or if no matches are found against existing Accept types.

In the controller

In the response object

Overriding formats

If there is a situation where the mime type you want to support is not being converted to the correct extension, either because it doesn't exist in the underlying libraries, or because it is matching the first extension and you want to use another, it is possible for you to manually specify overrides.

Look at audio/mpeg for example. There are several extensions associated with this content type.

This package will resolve the first match, i.e. mpga as the format type. If you want to override this extension, you can do the following...

In the controller

In the response object

The above would result in toMp3Response being called if the Accept header is audio/mpeg.

Routing

If you are wanting to embrace file extensions as a way of specifying response formats, you should explicilty specify the allowed formats in your routes file. This package does not provide any routing helpers (yet), but here is an example of how you can do it currently.

This route will be able to respond to the following urls and formats in the response object...

• http://example.com/users [HTML]
• http://example.com/users.pdf [PDF]
• http://example.com/users.csv [CSV]
• http://example.com/users.xlsx [XLSX]

I hate magic

That's cool. Not everyone loves it. You don't have to use the make method. Just add your own contructor and set your class attributes as you like!

The Journey

You've read the readme, you've seen the code, now read the journey. If you wanna see how I came to this solution, you can read my blog post: https://timacdonald.me/versatile-response-objects-laravel/. Warning: it's a bit of a rant.

tl;dr; DHH and Adam Wathan are awesome.

Thanksware

You are free to use this package, but I ask that you reach out to someone (not me) who has previously, or is currently, maintaining or contributing to an open source library you are using in your project and thank them for their work. Consider your entire tech stack: packages, frameworks, languages, databases, operating systems, frontend, backend, etc.