Filtering & Searching

Hey coolfarmer

That's a good question and by looking at the ApiPlatform docs I couldn't find anything related to define 2 strategies on the same property. So, I think what you need to do is to create your own filter by following this steps: https://api-platform.com/do...

Cheers!

Hi!

Little question, take for example that I have a "User" entity with a username property. Somewhere in my application I need to query a user from the API with the EXACT username, and at another place I want to query the samething but this time with PARTIAL. Is it possible to do that?

I know it's not the correct solution but something like that:
@ApiFilter(SearchFilter::class, properties={"username": "exact/partial"}

Then the request url will be:
http://api.domain.local:8785/users?username=tony&matchStrategy=exact

I'm not the best in english, hope you understand what I mean.
Thanks!

Hey Annemieke Buijs!

> But entity Brand is not related to the Customer entity, I can only get the brands via entity1 related to entity2, related to entity Product, finally related to entity Brand.
How can i do this?
I am thinking about creating a new entity with customer ids and brand ids together in a 'cross' table. But i hope there is a better way?

Hmm. Ideally we can avoid adding duplication to our database to make API Platform happy :). My initial instinct (which is a bit of cheating) is to tell the API client to use a different endpoint. What I mean is: why do they need this *specific* endpoint? It's definitely possible to add it - but there could be a much simpler solution if we have some flexibility. For example, a URL like /api/brands?customer=/api/customers/1 would probably be easier, though this would still need to be a custom filter (since there is not actually a "customer" property on brands). Another option would be to simply "add" a brands field when you fetch a customer (instead of making it a different URL). You could probably do this by adding a getBrands() method to Customer that loops over all the products and then returns an array of each Brand that is related to all the Products (if I've understood the relationships correctly).

But anyways, to implement this, I would create a custom item operation on Customer for the /api/customers/{id}/brands URL. I try to avoid having custom operations because it usually means you're trying to "bend" the system a little far - but it's not a huge deal, and you need to get your job done :). In this case, you would write a custom controller and be able to do whatever you want.

> But one thing is wrong. The hydra variable "hydra:totalItems" is still mentioning the original amount of records, as if there were no groupby.

Interesting! I don't know the answer to this - bit I'm a little surprised by it. The reason is that, behind the scenes, API Platform uses a "Doctrine paginator"... and since we're using Doctrine to build the query, I would expect it to be smart enough to get the proper count. Here is the code behind this: https://github.com/api-plat...

For you (and me), $object is an instance of ApiPlatform\Core\Bridge\Doctrine\Orm which is just a wrapper around Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Pagination\Paginator.

I'd be interested what the count query looks like. Typically (assuming you have a result that requires "pagination" - like more than 25 records) Doctrine will make a query *specifically* to get the total count (in addition to the query to get the specific results it needs). After making the API request, you can go to /_profiler to find the profiler for that API request. If you click into this and go to the Doctrine tab on the left, you'll be able to see all the queries including a query where Doctrine is trying to take your query and use it to get a count of all items. I'd be interested to know if that query looks "wrong" in some way.

I hope this helps!

Cheers!

Thank you very much for your reply. You're a big help as always. I've chosen to do it with a filter, far less work.
I have other questions for you, I hope you don't mind?

1.
I have an entity Brand that is related to another entity called Product. (One product has one Brand, one Brand has many Products).
Now the api-client wants a list of all the brands a customer is using.
Something like this:
/api/customer/{id}/brands

But entity Brand is not related to the Customer entity, I can only get the brands via entity1 related to entity2, related to entity Product, finally related to entity Brand.
How can i do this?
I am thinking about creating a new entity with customer ids and brand ids together in a 'cross' table. But i hope there is a better way?

2. I have created a Custom Doctrine ORM Extension.
Because I want to add a groupby to a query.
This works great, it makes sure the result set is grouped.
But one thing is wrong. The hydra variable "hydra:totalItems" is still mentioning the original amount of records, as if there were no groupby.
This is my code:


final class FooExtension implements QueryCollectionExtensionInterface, QueryItemExtensionInterface
{

public function applyToCollection(QueryBuilder $queryBuilder, QueryNameGeneratorInterface $queryNameGenerator,
string $resourceClass, string $operationName = null): void {
$this->addGroupBy($queryBuilder, $resourceClass);
}

public function applyToItem(QueryBuilder $queryBuilder, QueryNameGeneratorInterface $queryNameGenerator,
string $resourceClass, array $identifiers,string $operationName = null,array $context = []): void {
$this->addGroupBy($queryBuilder, $resourceClass);
}

private function addGroupBy(QueryBuilder $queryBuilder, string $resourceClass): void
{
if (Foo::class !== $resourceClass) {
return;
}
$rootAlias = $queryBuilder->getRootAliases()[0];
$queryBuilder->addGroupBy($rootAlias . '.foo_field');
}
}


How can i make hydra show me the correct number of records?

Thanks in advance and hope to hear from you soon!

Hey Annemieke Buijs!

Sorry for my slow reply. Honestly, I'm not sure if there is a strictly-agreed-upon best practice for this or not. You've listed 2 possible options - and there is (technically) one more - having the language in the URL - e.g. /api/en/articles, though this last one doesn't feel very RESTful to me (as it would mean that, in a philosophical level, /api/en/articles/1 and /api/es/articles/1 are different rest "resources").

So, I would choose between the two options that you listed - choosing which ever one would be most convenient for whoever is using your API. *Maybe* the "accept language" header is a better practice, but I wouldn't stress out over it if the query parameter is more convenient. Let's look at the implementation details of each:

A) If you used, ?language=en, then probably it would mean that your API is designed so that if, for example, I make a request to /api/articles that it returns the list of ALL articles in ALL languages. Then adding the language filter is just a matter of using the built-in API Platform filters.

B) If you used the "accept language" header, you have a little bit more work to do. You would need to parse the "accept language" header to determine which language to ultimately use. I would then *probably* create an "API Platform Doctrine extension" - https://api-platform.com/do... - that would limit the collection or choose the item result based which language you determine is correct. Then you should also add a Content-Language response header set to which language you ultimately chose. I would do that via a listener - https://api-platform.com/do... - the POST_RESPOND one (which just means you add a listener to the kernel.response event - called ResponseEvent in Symfony 4.3 and higher.

Let me know if this helps! Mostly, follow what will be most useful in your API - it sounds like you are only considering solid option.

Cheers!

Hi SymfonyCasts,

I have lots of data in lots of different languages, like about 26 languages.
Should i give the client the opportunity to add a 'language' FILTER to the get request like ?language=en or should the client add an 'accept language' to the request header?
And if the 'accept language' is the answer, how do i deal with this in api platform?

Thank you for your answer .

Hi Gustavo!

Good question - I actually don't know! Here are how I think it might look (stolen from a few Stack Overflow references):

App\Entity\CheeseListing:
    attributes:
        filters:
            - 'ApiPlatform\Core\Bridge\Doctrine\Orm\Filter\BooleanFilter'
            # I'm not sure how you would pass a filter with options. Maybe this?
            ApiPlatform\Core\Bridge\Doctrine\Orm\Filter\SearchFilter:
                properties: [{title: partial}]

Let me know if it works :).

Cheers!

Hi, thanks for that lesson.
How can i add an ApiFilter like BooleanFilter using a YAML config file?

Hey Sung Lee!

Sorry for my slow reply - great question. There are two probable approaches to this:

1) Use the elastic search integration: https://api-platform.com/do... - it's very robust, but could be overkill if you just need to do something simple.

2) Create a custom class (not a Doctrine entity, but you can still put it in the Entity directory) that contains whatever fields you want... which is maybe just a "results" array that will contain a mixture of objects? You will only want the "read" operations to be enabled for this resource (and probably just the collection operation). Then, use a custom data provider (https://api-platform.com/do... to take control of how you fetch the "collection". I'm not exactly sure how this would all look in the end, however... as I'm just "thinking" out loud. Assuming you created some custom class called ListingSearchResult and marked this an ApiResource, I guess you might give that properties like "item", which will be a CheeseListing or WineListing embedded object... and... I'm not sure if you need any other properties. So, the endpoint may look a bit funny.

I don't have a super great answer for this - well for suggestion (2). I think it could work and be nice... but it would need some more investigation. And, we might need to take some inspiration from what the ElasticSearch implementation looks like in Api Platform. Of course, you could always create a traditional endpoint that returns the results... e.g. just query for the array of CheeseListing & WineListing objects, then serialize that collection to the "jsonld" format.

Sorry I couldn't be more clear - this is not totally clear in my head, obviously :).

Cheers!

How can I create a /search api endpoint for unrelated tables?

After watching this tutorial, adding search function for a specific entity seems simple.
I was wondering how I can create a /search endpoint to search in multiple tables. For example, I have a CheeseListing and WineListing tables and there are no relations. I want to have a search feature that returns matching records from cheese description and wine description.

Any tips how to do this?

Thanks.

Thanks for you fast reply.

Hey Hamid,

We're trying to release one video per day! Most probably this course should be completely released in the beginning of the next week. Thank you for your patience!

Cheers!

could I know when you will publish the rest of this amazing training ?