Okay so I have a following situation:
The system I am building is retrieving data from a REST api and saving that data into a database. What I am wondering is how could this be implemented and where would behaviour like this go in sense of Laravels structure (controller, model etc.)? Does Laravel have a built in mechanism to retrieve data from external sources?
First you have to make routes in your app/routes.php
/*
API Routes
*/
Route::group(array('prefix' => 'api/v1', 'before' => 'auth.basic'), function()
{
Route::resource('pages', 'PagesController', array('only' => array('index', 'store', 'show', 'update', 'destroy')));
Route::resource('users', 'UsersController');
});
Note: If you are not required authentication for API call, you can remove 'before' => 'auth.basic'
Here you can access index, store, show, update and destroy
methods from your PagesController
.
And the request urls will be,
GET http://localhost/project/api/v1/pages // this will call index function
POST http://localhost/project/api/v1/pages // this will call store function
GET http://localhost/project/api/v1/pages/1 // this will call show method with 1 as arg
PUT http://localhost/project/api/v1/pages/1 // this will call update with 1 as arg
DELETE http://localhost/project/api/v1/pages/1 // this will call destroy with 1 as arg
The command line CURL request will be like this (here the username and password are admin
) and assumes that you have .htaccess
file to remove index.php
from url,
curl --user admin:admin localhost/project/api/v1/pages
curl --user admin:admin -d 'title=sample&slug=abc' localhost/project/api/v1/pages
curl --user admin:admin localhost/project/api/v1/pages/2
curl -i -X PUT --user admin:admin -d 'title=Updated Title' localhost/project/api/v1/pages/2
curl -i -X DELETE --user admin:admin localhost/project/api/v1/pages/1
Next, you have two controllers named PagesController.php
and UsersController.php
in your app/controllers
folder.
The PagesController.php,
<?php
class PagesController extends BaseController {
/**
* Display a listing of the resource.
*
* @return Response
* curl --user admin:admin localhost/project/api/v1/pages
*/
public function index() {
$pages = Page::all();;
return Response::json(array(
'status' => 'success',
'pages' => $pages->toArray()),
200
);
}
/**
* Store a newly created resource in storage.
*
* @return Response
* curl --user admin:admin -d 'title=sample&slug=abc' localhost/project/api/v1/pages
*/
public function store() {
// add some validation also
$input = Input::all();
$page = new Page;
if ( $input['title'] ) {
$page->title =$input['title'];
}
if ( $input['slug'] ) {
$page->slug =$input['slug'];
}
$page->save();
return Response::json(array(
'error' => false,
'pages' => $page->toArray()),
200
);
}
/**
* Display the specified resource.
*
* @param int $id
* @return Response
* curl --user admin:admin localhost/project/api/v1/pages/2
*/
public function show($id) {
$page = Page::where('id', $id)
->take(1)
->get();
return Response::json(array(
'status' => 'success',
'pages' => $page->toArray()),
200
);
}
/**
* Update the specified resource in storage.
*
* @param int $id
* @return Response
* curl -i -X PUT --user admin:admin -d 'title=Updated Title' localhost/project/api/v1/pages/2
*/
public function update($id) {
$input = Input::all();
$page = Page::find($id);
if ( $input['title'] ) {
$page->title =$input['title'];
}
if ( $input['slug'] ) {
$page->slug =$input['slug'];
}
$page->save();
return Response::json(array(
'error' => false,
'message' => 'Page Updated'),
200
);
}
/**
* Remove the specified resource from storage.
*
* @param int $id
* @return Response
* curl -i -X DELETE --user admin:admin localhost/project/api/v1/pages/1
*/
public function destroy($id) {
$page = Page::find($id);
$page->delete();
return Response::json(array(
'error' => false,
'message' => 'Page Deleted'),
200
);
}
}
Then you have model named Page
which will use table named pages
.
<?php
class Page extends Eloquent {
}
You can use Laravel4 Generators to create these resources using php artisan generator
command. Read here.
So using this route grouping you can use the same application to make API request and as a front-end.