Symfony RESTful API: Hypermedia, Links & Bonuses (Course 5)

Hey Thierno!

Ha, that's a big question! :) Maybe you can tell me what things specifically are the most confusing, and we can try to clear those up! We're planning on a ReactJS + Symfony tutorial soon (maybe also Angular after) - but if you have some specific questions, let me know!

Part of the problem is that there are many ways to do things. You might have a pure JS frontend and a pure API backend. In this case, I would still keep them in the same git repository (for convenience), but they would be isolated. Then, you need to decide how you want to handle authentication. Btw, in some pure JS frontends, people actually just have one index.html file that holds the JS code to bootstrap things. If your app is this pure, you can even deploy this file (and of course your JS files) to a CDN for faster performance.

Or, you might have a mix of a traditional web app with some pages that host reach Angular/React applications. We do exactly that on KnpU. This is a bit easier, as we just rely on our cookie/session authentication when making AJAX calls that require authentication.

Cheers!

Thx you Ryan for your answer.
I see what you mean but i want to make a social network in a single page app with angular 2 in the front-end and an API in the back-end with symfony 3 but i dont know if it is a good solution to develop it in a single page however it would be really cool if i could do this without leak of performance because i dont know if there is a problem with SPA and classic site in term of performance !!
THX

Hey Thierno!

I don't think you need to worry about performance - that's just a big topic, and one you can worry about later (neither method is inherently faster/slower). I typically recommend doing whatever you're more familiar with if you need to build this for a client or have some budget/deadline. But if this is more of a personal project and you want to learn, go with the approach that's less familiar to you :).

Good luck!

Thx u so much its very clear now
cheers

Hey Kaizoku,

I think calling each endpoint for every entity and aggregate results is not good for performance if you're talking about calling them by cURL requests. But if you're talking about calling those methods in your application internally that will return JSON - I think it's a valid case and you can do this way. Though, it depends, probably serialize them all at once, i.e. in one run would be better for performance than if you serialize them separately and aggregate JSON results. I'd recommend to measure performance and choose one or another based on the test results. But if performance would be very similar - do the easiest way for you.

I hope this helps.

Cheers!

This week! Wed or Thu actually. So nice timing :D

Hey Vlad!

When it comes to files, I think the best answer is to do whatever you would normally do on the web - i.e. return the same data (so in this case, probably binary) and content-type as normal. Also, if you look at GitHub's API (they're my goto to look at, because it's used by many people and is actually quite nice to use), if you ever ask them for a "download", they return JSON, with a key on that JSON to the URL the client can use to go fetch that assets. Then, I assume, they just serve that asset from a CDN. But, returning the PDF directly from a controller is also fine.

Cheers!

Hi Vlad!

Yes, you caught me - I saw this recently :). I actually don't remember what I was thinking here. In fact, my only idea was that I was thinking about doing a (!$baseUrl), and then throwing an exception to help the user know this isn't set. I'm not sure if that's what I was thinking... but it's either that or nothing: I haven't seen any bug or problem with the code that I now realized I forgot to fix.

Unless you can see something I may have meant? That would be awesome :).

Cheers!

How about this:

$baseUrl = getenv('TEST_BASE_URL');
if (!$baseUrl) {
        static::fail('No TEST_BASE_URL environmental variable set in phpunit.xml.');
}

I've also added:

stopOnError="true"
stopOnFailure="true"

to the <strong>phpunit.xml</strong> file

I like it!

I've just updated the starting code to add the static::fail() line :) (ref https://github.com/knpunive.... I kept the stopOnError stuff the way it was - I don't feel too strongly about those settings, and the user can override them.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Yo VinZ!

Of course, it depends... like everything :). Let me give you a quick answer to get you started. File uploads through an API don't always look like file uploads through a browser. For non-huge file uploads, I would probably have an endpoint where the user sends the file. For example, if I'm uploading my avatarImage for my user account, I might make a PUT to /users/{username}/avatar. In this, the entire body of the request would be the image file's contents. I would then read those manually in my controller with $request->getContent() and then save the file somewhere. I'm not sure if VichUploaderBundle can help you with this or not: it's usually good at taking an UploadedFile object and (a) moving the file for you and (b) setting the filename field on your entity. But in this case, you start with the file contents, and then it's pretty easy to save that where you want, create whatever filename you want, and then update your entity yourself. That bundle may have something to help with this - I'm just not sure. And I've never heard of the VichUploaderSerializationBundle before this, but I suspect this is more helpful for serializing from your entity object to JSON, but not the other way around.

Btw, another alternative is to send your contents up simply on a key of some JSON data (but base 64 encoded). That is exactly what GitHub's API does: https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/contents/#create-a-file

I hope this at least gets you started!

Thanks weaverryan, in the meantime, I choose to receive a base64 encoded image through JSON data, and then transform it into an UploadedFIle object and pass it to my FormType. Looks like it does the trick.

    public function createAction(Request $request)
    {
        $chat = new Chat();
        $form = $this->createForm(new ChatType(), $chat);
        $data = json_decode($request->getContent(), true);
        if (array_key_exists('imageFile', $data)) {
            $uploadedFile = new UploadedBase64EncodedFile(new Base64EncodedFile($data['imageFile']));
            unset($data['imageFile']);
        }
        $form->submit($data);
        if (!$form->isValid()) {
            $this->throwApiProblemValidationException($form);
        }
        if (isset($uploadedFile)) {
            $chat->setImageFile($uploadedFile);
        }
        $em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
        $em->persist($chat);
        $em->flush();
        return $this->createApiResponse($chat);
    }

Ah, super cool! I assume the UploadedBase64EncodedFile is from this library? https://github.com/hshn/bas...

Very nice solution! Thanks for sharing :)

weaverryan thanks :) only problem is I don't get any validation for the image :/

Hey VinZ!

Hmm. There might be an easy way to solve that. If you create an imageFile field on your form that is a "file" type... then you might actually be able to put the UploadedBase64EncodedFile object onto the $data array before calling submit. In other words, you're basically manually adding the uploaded file to the submitted data, so that it is present for the form to process:

if (array_key_exists('imageFile', $data)) {
    $uploadedFile = new UploadedBase64EncodedFile(new Base64EncodedFile($data['imageFile']));
    $data['imageFile'] = $uploadedFile;
}

Oh, another idea! Even simpler, just move your setImageFile call before the $form->isValid(). As long as the data is on your entity object, it will be validated (even if the field is not actually part of your form).

Anyways, let me know if either of those work :).

Cheers!

Hey weaverryan, your first solution worked nicely thanks! I thought I had tried it before and wasn't working, but obviously, no! Full working code:

 public function createAction(Request $request, $id)
    {
        $chat = new Chat();
        $form = $this->createForm(new ChatType(), $chat);
        $data = json_decode($request->getContent(), true);
        if (array_key_exists('imageFile', $data)) {
            $uploadedFile = new UploadedBase64EncodedFile(new Base64EncodedFile($data['imageFile']));
            $data['imageFile'] = $uploadedFile;
        }
        $form->submit($data);
        if (!$form->isValid()) {
            $this->throwApiProblemValidationException($form);
        }
        $em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
        $em->persist($chat);
        $em->flush();

        return $this->createApiResponse($chat);
    }

Awesome! Thanks again for sharing your working solution! Very interesting!

Not in this one, but I LOVE that bundle. I *am* considering an episode 6 about documentation - basically moving the planned ep3 from the Silex rest series over here as ep 6.

I've already finished recording this course, and I'm *really* excited about it - watch for it in a few weeks!

About episode 6, my vote is: YEEEEES!!!!! - Sorry, Brazil crazy things!
What do you think about: https://apigility.org
:)

I think it's a good idea. In my limited experience, it's crazy verbose - I don't love how Zend usually does things, but I keep an eye on it :).

Understand. That is made in Symfony: https://api-platform.com. I keep an eye on it too.