/blog/2015/04/how-to-use-a-cakephp-3-rest-api/

[bravo-kernel]

How to use a CakePHP 3 REST API

https://www.bravo-kernel.com/blog/2015/04/how-to-use-a-cakephp-3-rest-api/

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Mark Scherer [DISQUS]: It might be worth mentioning https://github.com/UseMuffin/Throttle and the Throttle DispatcherFactory to manage the amount of hits to your API if you need that.

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: A very good suggestion indeed, the plugin recently has been updated to CakePHP 3.x with some improvements and 100% test coverage

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avinashjoshi [DISQUS]: I'm not sure if this has been asked before. Is there a way to add a custom parameter to the index action? For example, I would like to be able to search while not breaking existing API functionality given by CURD.

Any thoughts on this would be helpful!

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: I'm sure there is but please join the #FriendsOfCake channel on IRC for any CRUD related support or questions.

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avinashjoshi [DISQUS]: Thank you. But I looked further into their documentation. Below is a very basic example:

public function index() {  
    $this->Crud->on('beforePaginate', [$this, '_beforePaginate']);  
    return $this->Crud->execute();  
}

public function _beforePaginate(\Cake\Event\Event $event) {  
    if (isset($this->request->query['search'])) {  
        $search = $this->request->query['search'];  
        $this->paginate['conditions']['name LIKE'] = '%' . $search . '%';  
    }  
}

Read More: http://crud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/events.html#crud-beforepaginate

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D. Swaroop [DISQUS]: Thanks for the wonderful article. Can you please tell me how the sample xml request should be for adding a Cocktail as I am trying to explore the 'xml' option of the REST API?

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Sam Bown [DISQUS]: Go to config/routes.php and add the following

Router::extensions(['json', 'xml']); //this provides extension to xml, json data.

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: I believe Mr. Swaroop is looking for example XML bodies he can use, similar to the JSON bodies shown in the POST and PUT examples ;)

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Sam Bown [DISQUS]: I use JSON for data exchange. You could look at awesome tutorial on how to handle XML data in PHP
http://php.net/manual/en/book.simplexml.php
http://php.net/manual/en/book.xml.php

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Icaro R. Scherma [DISQUS]: Do you know if is easy to implement to forbid the default HTML render on the Router Scope "/api" ? Because I don't want to SERVER/api/cocktails to be accessed in the browser, only SERVER/api/cocktails.json , I haven't tested to create a /Api/CocktailsController.php yet but with this it will not find the TemplateViews and will throw a 404?

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Please turn to the CakePHP IRC channel for general support questions, there are plenty people there who can help you out.

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Icaro R. Scherma [DISQUS]: Ahhh, and please recommend to Mac Users to use Cocoa REST Client (http://mmattozzi.github.io/cocoa-rest-client/) it is way more lightweight and useful than the other solutions =)

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Added to the list of choices

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Guima Ferreira [DISQUS]: I followed this tutorial and using Postman it works perfectly, but my AngularJS app is getting "No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin http://localhost:9000 is therefore not allowed access.".

I tried use $this->response->header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin','*') and other solutions that i found at web, but didn't work. Can you help me?

EDIT
I noticed that the problem is occurring when I do POST data, like when register a user.

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: "The reason it works in your browser is because it isn't making a cross-origin request (CORS) - whereas your Angular code is." http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24134117/no-access-control-allow-origin-header-is-present-on-the-requested-resource-an. Please turn to the Angular channel for support.

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Guima Ferreira [DISQUS]: Thanks for the answer. I discovered that when CakePHP throw an exception, like validation erros, it doesn't send the headers needed to give access to response.

I put the headers at AppController's beforeFilter, when the response is 200, it works, but when is 412, or 401, for example, my browser are not allowed to access the json response.

These are the headers:

$this->response->header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', 'http://localhost:9000');  
$this->response->header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods','*');  
$this->response->header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials', 'true');  
$this->response->header('Access-Control-Allow-Request-Method', '*');  
$this->response->header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers','Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept, Authorization');

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Aha, I see, did you manage to solve this? If not please turn to the CakePHP IRC channel for help and let us know how you fixed this.

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Guima Ferreira [DISQUS]: I found a solution, I think it's not the best way, but it worked.

I put the header at bootstrap.php. If you have a better suggestion, please, let me know.

bootstrap.php

header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://localhost:9000');  
header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: *');  
header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true');  
header('Access-Control-Allow-Request-Method: *');  
header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept, Authorization');

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avinashjoshi [DISQUS]: Were you able to find a better solution? The CORS plugin https://github.com/snelg/cakephp-cors is an awesome solution not to put headers in `bootstrap.php` (It uses the Routing Filters, which is neat)

BUT, this does also not work for `412`, `401` or other errors / exceptions thrown (just like you mentioned). Let me know if you found a good solution.

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Mark [DISQUS]: hey just wanted to say, thanks so much, this had me up and running with working APIs in minutes. Better than the FriendsOfCake docs themselves :) Now the only suggestion and request would be for slightly more explanations as to what each part is, so that I can really understand what each thing does and how they all fit together - that way I feel I have a better understanding to take things further :) Thanks again

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: That's what the CakePHP Book, CRUD documentation and #cakephp channel are for ;)

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Mark [DISQUS]: can anyone help - i am getting 'success: true' from my 'edit: put' crud API call, however the underlying table is not really being changed. How do u debug this thing ? :)

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danieldrope [DISQUS]: If something goes wrong how I return a message with a http status code 400? all in json format?

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: You might want to create your own custom Exception a-la https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/crud/blob/master/src/Error/Exception/ValidationException.php

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Thiago Dias [DISQUS]: Hi!

I did everything as shown in this tutorial, but when I POST data (equivalent to add action) by the Postman, I recieve the following error:

code: 412  
message: "3 validation errors occurred"  
errors:  
first_name: This field is required  
last_name: This field is required  
last_update: This field is required

But I send these data in following json:

{  
  "actor": {  
  "first_name": "THIAGO",  
  "last_name": "DIAS"  
  }  
}

What is wrong?

(Sorry for my bad english)

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Thiago Dias [DISQUS]: The first problem I solved. Was a typing error in routes. But the second problem keep happening. What is wrong?

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: This is not a help forum Mr. @disqus_nBzwczZbfz:disqus so please turn to the IRC channel for help, you will get support there. As a closing note to help you on your way... did you map the resources in your routes files like: $routes->resources('Actors');

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Thiago Dias [DISQUS]: Sorry, but what is IRC? And, I mapped and now {table_name}/{number} works. But when I still POSTing data, I receive 412.

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: https://www.dereuromark.de/2013/01/27/irc-cakephp-channel/

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Morga [DISQUS]: Hi,

First of all thank you for this tutorial. I have a problem with pagination:

I'm creating an app for android which have to query my API for data. There are more than a thousand records in the table, so I have to paginate. I want to load 50 records per page and I know how to load the first 50 records, my problem is that I dont know how to get the next 50 records. I'm new to cakephp and php, it might be easy but I can't figure it out. Any help or link would be appreciate.

PS: I'm not using CRUD plugin

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Please turn to the #cakephp channel for general support questions.

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Jérôme Lafforgue [DISQUS]: I met a problem that took me a long time to resolve during authentication with my browser that sends two queries.
A preflight request type "OPTIONS" which verifies page anser and another type "GET" https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS#Preflighted_requests. The first request was returning a 401 error which had the effect of never me to login . To counter this, I added in my AppController.php the following lines .

if ($this->request->is('options')){  
    header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");  
    die();  
}  

Maybe this will help someone.

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Ashish Patel [DISQUS]: Hi Guys,

I have implemented CRUD in my project and everything is working fine. But the problem I am facing is related to PUT method

I have 2 tables in my database 'animals' and 'animals_images'.

When I try to call PUT method to update existing 'animals'. the 'animals' table data is getting updated but the api is inserting new data in 'animals_images' in place of updating in 'animals_images' table.

Is there anyone who can help me to fix this problem?

Thanks and Regards,
Ashish

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Ashish Patel [DISQUS]: Hello Guys,

I have fixed the problem. I just copied the code from Baked Controller for my table class and updated the contain statement like this

$animal = $this->Animals->get($id, [
    'contain' => [ 'AnimalsImages']
]);

I hope this will help someone else too to fix the problem if he/she faced while calling put method to udpate the associated table.

Regards,
Ashish

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Sebastián Scarano [DISQUS]: Hi. I tried the tutorial with my own controller/table and all went grate. Except that the index response does not include "pagination" key. I simpliflied pagination to

public $paginate = [  
    'page' => 12,  
    'limit' => 10,  
    'maxLimit' => 100,  
];  

Changing $paginate values does get reflected on response data.
Any idea why this might happen?. Thanks!

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Aaron Overton [DISQUS]: If you try to use the templates created by bake to edit anything, you will get a fatal error message about a call to function set() on boolean in BaseAction.php, line 193 (at the time of this writing.) To fix this, you will need to add Flash to your list of components on AppController.

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Ronald Sony [DISQUS]: I created this account just to thank you, Aaron! hahaha
I was freaking out here without knowing how to deal with this exact problem.
Thank you very much!

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Aaron Overton [DISQUS]: Fantastic! You're welcome.

I think debugging is as much a mark of competent programmer as the actual programming itself!

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Sebastien Galarneau [DISQUS]: I'm trying to redo the exact same tutorial step by step. Everything is going well until its comes to POST a cocktail... i'm getting this response from cake

{  
  "message": "2 validation errors occurred",  
  "url": "/cocktails",  
  "code": 422  
}

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Brian Strasburg [DISQUS]: I get the same result, any answer?

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Brian Strasburg [DISQUS]: Never mind, I was using form-data for the body. It worked when I started to use x-www-form-urlencoded in postman.

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Khalil [DISQUS]: I think there's a mistake in the tutorial, http://cake3api.app/cocktails/5 should be http://cake3api.app/cocktails/view/5

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Not really, your second URL is the CakePHP default route. The first (and IMO preferred) URL is nothing more than an alias created by the Crud plugin to allow for more common REST resource access. You may use both, just try.

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Khalil [DISQUS]: Great tutorial, and perfect way of explaining everything!
I was just wondering, this is enough for anyone to build a rest API, however, one thing is missing, how do we handle file upload in that case? it would be great if you add that to the tutorial or link me to some resource where I can find answers.
Keep it up !

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Thanks, glad you find this useful. File uploading is actually on my follow-up list, just don't haven't reached that point yet. Working on "How to pimp your CakePHP API" first.

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Khalil [DISQUS]: Perfect! Can't wait! :)
I was able to go around it with the Upload plugin, the only issue is that when you use a multipart/form-data, the api doesn't return the proper json response no matter what you add to the header, unless you add .json extension to the endpoint.
Waiting to pimp the API ! :) keep it up

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bharadwaja [DISQUS]: @bravo_kernel:disqus
Thanks for your great tutorials!
I've one doubt related to CRUD plugin, I need to update the record as status = 0, instead of deleting the record.
Right now I'm using CRUD plugin, it's deleting the record.
Could you please suggest us good solution, to update the record instead of delete. ( like by using beforeDelete or some other approach ).

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: It sounds like you need soft-delete functionality. Lookup Muffin/Trash plugin on the cakephp awesome page here: https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/awesome-cakephp

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bharadwaja [DISQUS]: Thanks!

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sabrinagelbart [DISQUS]: love it. I use Laravel - this is so much better.

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Glad you like it and you might like this even better... JSON API in the making at FriendsOfCake/crud#445

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Bikash Chhualsingh [DISQUS]: Is anywhere you mentioned the Cocktails's index() method? There is no index method in the nigher Cocktails controller nor in it's parent controller.

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Bravo Kernel [DISQUS]: Exactly, you have discovered the power of CRUD. No need to repeat ourselves, no need to repeatedly create index actions ;) Check https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/crud