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I’ve been using Fractal for API development for the past two years.

If there’s one feature I’d most like Laravel to add, it’s easy data conversion in order to develop a better API.

Don’t get me wrong, Fractal is great, but I’ve always wanted to develop in a framework. I don’t use class libraries if I can! I don’t like using third party libraries to complicate development.

Over the past year, I’ve enjoyed using front-end frameworks such as Vue and React for development. Therefore, I chose to use only Laravel to build the API. When I need to build an API, Fractal is my library of choice. Now, things have changed.

In Laravel 5.5, we have API resources, which I’m really excited about.

Laravel 5.5 was released 2 hours ago while I was having coffee with a friend. When I read this tweet about half an hour ago, the first thought that came to my mind was to use API resources to publish my first blog post, which I did.

Laravel’s API resources are based on Fractal, so I didn’t spend much time learning how to use it. So, let’s begin to understand it…


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Create the Laravel application

Use the common command line to create the Laravel application

composer create-project laravel/laravel Laravel55ApiCopy the code

.env.example
.env 

php artisan key:generateCopy the code

Start the service

php artisan serveCopy the code

Good. What’s next?


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Create a Product resource

API resources are a new feature for converting your models and collections of models to JSON in Laravel. Next let’s create a resource for Product.

php artisan make:resource ProductCopy the code

app/Http/Resources

Of course we also need the database migration, model, and controller for Product. We can create these quickly with this command.

php artisan make:model Product -mcCopy the code

up 

public function up()
{
    Schema::create('products', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->increments('id');
        $table->string('name');
        $table->integer('price');
        $table->timestamps();
    });
}Copy the code

I beg you, never store your price data in floating point!
Be sure to store it as an integer!

Now connect to the database with your Laravel application and run the migration to generate the tables.

This is not a Laravel one-to-one tutorial post, so I won’t waste too much of your time on connecting to the database.


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The next?

So far, we have models, controllers, database migrations, and resource classes for converting models and model collections to JSON. So what happens next?

resources

With that in mind, let’s open the product.php resource class file.

There’s a toArray method, and that’s the method that returns the array of properties that need to be converted to JSON when we send the response.

Let’s modify it so we can have better ideas.

public function toArray($request)
{
    return [
        'id' => $this->id,
        'name' => $this->name,
        'price' => $this->price,
        'created_at' => $this->created_at,
        'updated_at' => $this->updated_at,
    ];
}Copy the code

id, name, price, created_at
updated_at

If we remove the price field from the toArray method, there will be no price in the JSON returned. Isn’t that cool?


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useProductresources

toArray
product
product 

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Product;
use App\Http\Resources\Product as ProductResource;

class ProductController extends Controller
{
    public function show ($id)
    {
        return new ProductResource(Product::find($id));
    }
}Copy the code

product
product
product
show
api.php 

Route::get('/products/{id}', 'ProductController@show');Copy the code

Now, hand in your products list to add a new product, and then visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/products/1 to see a simple product.

Here’s what you should get:

Now let’s modify our resources a bit. If you don’t want to expose the price of your product, all you have to do is simply delete it from your toArray method. Once you remove the price from the toArray method, you should get something like this, excluding price of course:


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Is that all?

toArray
toArray 

public function toArray($request)
{
    return [
        'id' => $this->id,
        'name' => $this->name,
        'test' => 'This is just a test',
        'created_at' => $this->created_at,
        'updated_at' => $this->updated_at,
    ];
}Copy the code

Here are the results:


price
integer
(int) $this->price
integer
create_at
updated_at 

public function toArray($request)
{
    return [
        'id' => $this->id,
        'name' => $this->name,
        'test' => 'This is just a test',
        'created_at' => (string)$this->created_at,
        'updated_at' => (string)$this->updated_at,
    ];
}Copy the code

Now the result is this:


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conclusion

This is just a small example of using Laravel API resources.

If I keep writing, THIS article will never be finished.

So that’s it for this article, and as you know, there are many more topics to discuss, such as paging, resource collections, associations, and data wraps.


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