I am following the tutorial in the CakePHP book that explains the basics of setting up a RESTful web service.
So far, I've updated my routes file to the following:
Router::mapResources('stores');
Router::parseExtensions('json');
I have also setup a blank layout in app/layouts/json and the appropriate json views. I am receiving my json output successfully when I navigate to controller/action.json
I am wondering though, without the.json extension it attempts to load the regular view. I am looking to build a pure api with only json output, is there any way to prevent regular render output instead?
You could force a rendering as JSON if you can recognise a JSON request another way. For example, if the Accepts HTTP header contains application/json, you could put this in your controller:
public function beforeFilter(){
if ($this->request->accepts('application/json')) {
$this->RequestHandler->renderAs($this, 'json');
}
parent::beforeFilter();
}
It's CakePHP 2.0 notation, but something similar probably exists for CakePHP 1.2 and 1.3.
You could also detect the request Content-Type instead, or as well, especially if Accepts is not used.
What are you seeing at the moment? If you've used bake Cake may have generated the views for you?
Just delete the views in /app/views/layout and /app/views/controllername
If you are trying to prevent the request from hitting the controller at all then I'm not so sure, you could just update your .htaccess file to only send requests ending in .json to the app or something similar.
here is what i did.
if i know i'm building only json API, i added to my AppController.php following:
public function beforeFilter()
{
if (empty($this->request->params['ext']) || $this->request->params['ext'] != "json")
{
$this->render(FALSE, 'maintenance'); //no view, only layout
$this->response->send();
$this->_stop();
}
}
and in my /app/Layouts/maintenance.ctp
echo __('Invalid extension');
this way all requests without the json extension will end up on the "maintenance" page where you can put any info you want, i'm planning to put there link to API docs.
Related
It took me a while to understand this, being that it was a little obvious. I will answer myself, so other can benefit of the answer and ofcourse to see if there's a better way to do this. The problem was based on Axios/Yii2 but I guess this will apply equally to other frontend libraries/frameworks sending data to Yii2.
I needed to post data from a small form made on Vuejs, sending the request Axios to a Action/Controller on Yii2, so data is sent on a simple POST request and the post is getting to the controller, but I was not able to receive the data on the action, $_POST | $post arrives empty (checked using xdebug).
As much as I remember, this had something to do with security. But I already tried by disabling public $enableCsrfValidation, so that was not the problem.
public $enableCsrfValidation = false;
But no matter what, data was not being added to the request/post data inside Yii2.
The following Image, explains the problem you will find there:
The Axisos method that sends the post with test data.
The Yii2 Action stpoed at the place, I should be able to see data.
The capture of the xdebug variables and data for the request.
The capture of Chrome where you can check the payload is sent.
The answer is as I said "kind of obvious", but I could not see that, and I am sure some other devs will probably fall on this.
After searching like crazy and asking everyone, I tried sending the request by using Postman app, yup the best thing I know to test apis.
Dont forgue to add the xdebug cookie to be able to debug your PHP Endpoint.
There I found the first clue «the obvious part», I was not sending data as a form-data, Axios and other libraries, send the data as a raw (application/json) payload.
This means that Yii2 will no be able to find the data inside the post request, yes its there but Yii2 magic will not work, neither you will find this data inside $GLOBALS or in $_POST.
So reading the Yii2 documentation I found that inside request I can use a function that will help me recovering the Raw data, so to do this use the following line:
$raw_data = Yii::$app->request->getRawBody();
Now, that data gets to you as a simple, raw json string, so use the power of PHP to parse it to an object.
$object= json_decode($raw_data );
And finally use the data inside by calling the properties you look for, sent on the pay load:
Json Payload:
{
"msg":"This is my payload",
"id":"11"
}
To use it:
echo $object->{'msg'}; // prints: This is my payload
So that's the way to handle that, now I would like some other points of view to see if there's a better way or cleaner way to do this. Hope it helps.
I want to make a RESTful API in my CakePHP application however, the only way it describes is using extensions (a.k.a file extensions) https://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/development/routing.html#creating-restful-routes but this isn't feasible for me considering that I actually have JSON files that I do not wish to get confused with CakePHP, not only that but adding .json or whatever to the end of a path is likely to be missed and omitting it does not change that it will actually go there causing an error to show.
Is there a way to create RESTful routes without using extensions?
Extensions are optional
Extensions are by no means required for RESTful routes to work. Extensions are part of how the request handler component configures the rendering and response process, the routes themselves will work just fine without specifying extensions.
It looks like the docs are kind of outdated, the sentence describing the code example doesn't make any sense:
The first line sets up a number of default routes for easy REST access where method specifies the desired result format (e.g. xml, json, rss). These routes are HTTP Request Method sensitive.
I guess this belongs to an older code example. You may want to report this over at GitHub.
Use the Accept header
That being said, the request handler component also evaluates the Accept header, so you could make sending application/json the requirement for your API.
Also if you don't want to accept non-JSON requests at all, then you should check Request::is() and throw an exception accordingly.
if (!$this->request->is('json')) {
throw new \Cake\Network\Exception\BadRequestException():
}
Hardcode the components behavior
Furthermore it's possible to overwrite the extension that the request handler determines, and make the component think this is a JSON request:
$this->RequestHandler->ext = 'json';
It should be noted that this won't affect methods like RequestHandler::prefers()!
And finally you can also use the RequestHandler::renderAs() method to tell the request handler how to render and respond:
$this->RequestHandler->renderAs($this, 'json');
This however would need to be done in the Controller.beforeRender event in order to override the components behavior in case it identifies a request of a type that it is normally ment to handle.
See also
Cookbook > Controllers > Request & Response Objects > Checking Request Conditions
Cookbook > Controllers > Components > Request Handling > Responding To Requests
API > \Cake\Controller\Component\RequestHandlerComponent::$ext
I'm doing a web app based on original MEAN.js framework. When I want to request local json test file using $http.get() method in my AngularJS file, it returned my index html content.Is it a routing problem? I didnot change the original mean.js routing code(https://github.com/meanjs/mean), just added a $http.get() method in home.client.controller.js file. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks!
That is most likely happening, because you didn't define an endpoint for that particular GET request in your app.
Everytime you make a request to your server (for example a GET request to /my-request) nodejs/express are configured in MEAN.js so that your server will try to find the endpoint for that request, if it does not find any, that request will be handled by this particular code block (specified in /modules/core/server/routes/core.server.routes.js):
// Define application route
app.route('/*').get(core.renderIndex);
Which will basically render the index view.
I'm not sure if you're using a custom module or not, eitherway, if you want that request to be handled in a different way in MEAN.js, you can specify your endpoint in your custom module routes file (or in core.server.controller.js) like so:
// Define application route
app.route('/my-request').get(core.sendMyJSON);
Be careful, because this route must be placed before the one I mentioned earlier, otherwise your request will still be handled the same way and the index view will be rendered and served again.
Then you will have to create the controller that should be called to handle that request:
exports.sendMyJSON = function (req, res) {
// logic to serve the JSON file
};
This way you should be able to get it done with a few adjustments.
Side note:
I'm not entirely sure but I think if you place your JSON file in the public directory of your app you should be able to directly access it without the need for the extra logic.
I'm developing an API where if the user specifies the action with .json as a suffix (e.g. admin/users.json), they get the response in the return of json, otherwise they get a regular html View.
Some actions may not have a json response, in which case they would just return a html View.
Does anyone have advice on how this can be implemented cleanly? I was hoping it could be achieved via the routing.
I suggest you to create your application as an api.
Foreach page, you need two controllers. Each controller use a different route (in your case, one route ending by .json, and one without).
The json controller return data in json form. The "normal" controller call the corresponding json route, deserialize the json, then pass the resulting array to the view.
This way, you've got a standardized api (and maintained, because your own app use it) available, as well as a "normal" website.
More information:
Consuming my own Laravel API
Edit: Maybe it's doable with a filter, but I'm not sure about that and I don't have time to try it myself right now.
In Laravel 5.x, to implement both capabilities like sending data for AJAX or JSON request and otherwise returning view template for others, all you have to do is check $request->ajax() or $request->isJson().
public function controllerMethod(Request $request)
{
if ($request->ajax() || $request->isJson()) {
//Get data from your Model or whatever
return $data;
} else {
return view('myView.index');
}
}
I'm trying to deal with: "Requests made from Javascript running on your web pages must be proxied to avoid same-origin policy conflicts."
I know how to work with the JSON once I've got it. But aside from copy-pasting the JSON results via my browser, I don't know how to localize it for use.
Did you tried
$.getJSON('url', function(data){
//do smth with data
})
?
After the request is complete, data will be an object with all JSON response and you can access it as regular js object: data.something and so on.