A toolkit building on API Resources in Laravel.

---

Concept

RESTful API endpoints typically require more functionality than pagination alone. For example, a front-end or mobile application may implement a filtering scheme or require access to the endpoint's nested resources. Lapis intends to provide a lightweight filtering and nested resource pattern leveraging the existing facilities in Laravel 5.5.

Includes

Let's say we have an endpoint in a blogging platform to list our post resources returning a response like so:
GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts

{
  "posts": [
    {
      "name": "Asparagus Steak Oscar",
      "category": "food",
      "postedAt": "2017-09-12 16:04:33",
      "authorId": 14
    },
    {
      "name": "Churchill Downs Mint Julep",
      "category": "drinks",
      "postedAt": "2017-10-05 18:32:12",
      "authorId": 15
    }
  ]
}

Ideally we would want to see details of a post's author in our front-end. Right, so make another request to a hypothetical users endpoint referencing a distinct list of authorIds from the posts response...No, absolutely not! We (hopefully) spent the time in our blogging platform's backend to model our data's relationships and set up foreign key constraints with appropriate indices. So let's put those models to work.

Lapis, leveraging Laravel's API Resources, allows us to add an include parameter on our request URL to retrieve the nested author (User) relationship. Our request URL and response would look something like this:

GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts?include=author

{
  "posts": [
    {
      "name": "Asparagus Steak Oscar",
      "category": "food",
      "postedAt": "2017-09-12 16:04:33",
      "authorId": 14,
      "author": {
        "id": 14,
        "name": "John Doe",
        "forHire": true,
        "chefRating": 5
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "Churchill Downs Mint Julep",
      "category": "drinks",
      "postedAt": "2017-10-05 18:32:12",
      "authorId": 15,
      "author": {
        "id": 15,
        "name": "James Smith",
        "forHire": false,
        "chefRating": 1
      }
    }
  ]
}

Nested Includes

This will also work for nested relationships. For example, if our User model contained a favorites relationship we could request GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts?include=author.favorites and an array of the author's favorites would be nested inside the author object.

Filtering

Let's go back to our original response above, for which we called the posts endpoint. Maybe we only want to see posts from the drinks category. We could alter our call from above like so:

GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts?filter[category]=drinks

{
  "posts": [
    {
      "name": "Churchill Downs Mint Julep",
      "category": "drinks",
      "postedAt": "2017-10-05 18:32:12",
      "authorId": 15
    }
  ]
}

We can also specify multiple filters using this structure:

GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts?filter[category]=drinks&filter[authorId]=15

Nested Filters

We discussed including an author relationship above. We can also filter on the author's details by making a request like so:

GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts?filter[author.forHire]=true

Filter Operators

Up until this point we've just used filters to assert a field is equal to a given value. Filters understand the concept of operators. Here are a few examples:

List posts later than October 1, 2017.

GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts?filter[postedAt{gte}]=2017-10-01

List posts where the author's name starts with John.

GET https://api.myrecipeblog.com/posts?filter[author.name{starts}]=John

Reference Implementation

Installation & Usage