API Responder

This package provides some tools to generate API responses based on the White House Standards and some customization for SnappMarket team in Laravel.

💡 To start over, please read this document.

Installation

$ composer require snappmarket/api-responder

Usage

The bellow aliases are being registered in the main service provider of this package.

• ApiResponderResponse for SnappMarket\ApiResponder\Facades\Response
• ApiResponderErrors for SnappMarket\ApiResponder\Facades\ErrorsRepository

In all the examples below, the aliases are being used instead of the full namespaces.

Registering Errors

Based on the White House Standards, every error code should points to an error entity. In the API Responder, you can register your errors and their information in an ErrorsRepository class to use them after that.

ApiResponderErrors::register(
     '40001',
     'Verbose, plain language description of the problem. Provide developers suggestions about how to solve their problems here',
     'This is a message that can be passed along to end-users, if needed.',
     'http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444'
);

Unregistering Errors

It is a common problem that you need to unregister an error after registering it. You can do that with the code below.

ApiResponderErrors::unregister('40001');

Making Failure Responses

Given that in the White House Standards failure responses should return 400 or 500 responses. So that we have two usable methods to return errors with these statuses.

• clientError(): This method is ready to generate the response body for the client errors.

  ApiResponderResponse::clientError('40001');

• serverError(): This method is ready to generate the response body for the server errors.

  ApiResponderResponse::serverError('40001');

After that, we also have another method to be used when you want to specify the status manually.

ApiResponderResponse::error('40001', 422);

in SnappMarket, we add an object to the response JSON with name errors. This field can contain the detailed errors.

Replacements

You can place some replaceable phrases in the errors info while registering it, to make their contents dynamic. The replaceable phrases should start with a :.

ApiResponderResponse::register(
     '40001',
     'The class `:class` is undefined.',
     'An error has been occurred in while finding the :entity.',
     'http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444'
);

return ApiResponderResponse::clientError(40001, [
     'class'  => 'Entities/User',
     'entity' => 'user',
],
[
     'field' => [
         'The field has an error.'
     ]
])

The returning value will be:

{
  "status": 400,
  "developerMessage": "The class `Entities/User` is undefined.",
  "userMessage": "An error has been occurred in while finding the user.",
  "errorCode": "40001",
  "moreInfo": "http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444",
  "errors": {
      "field": [
          "The field has an error."
      ]
  }
}

Omitting Error Exception

By default, the errors repository throws exceptions on registering a previously registered error code and requesting for a non-existing error code. But you can disable throwing these exceptions with the code below.

ApiResponderErrors::disableExceptions();

Making Success Responses

As the White House Standards says, the success responses must contain two parts; results and metadata. We also add a meessages array to the metadata to contain messages. These parts can be passed to a success() method to generate a success response.

$results  = [
     [
          'id'    => 1,
          'title' => 'First Item',
     ],
     [
          'id'    => 2,
          'title' => 'Second Item',
     ],
];
$metadata = ['page' => 1];
$messages = [
    'The list of the items may be incomplete in some cases'
];
    
$response = ApiResponderResponse::success($results, $metadata, $messages);

Key Formatter

You can register a closure to be used to format all the keys which are being generated by the package. For example, if we have a snake_case() function to map strings to the snake-case format, we can use the below code.

ApiResponderErrors::register(
     '40001',
     'Verbose, plain language description of the problem. Provide developers suggestions about how to solve their problems here',
     'This is a message that can be passed along to end-users, if needed.',
     'http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444'
);

ApiResponderErrors::registerFormatter(function ($key) {
    return snake_case($key);
});


return ApiResponderErrors::clientError(40001);

The returning result of this code will be:

{
  "status": 400,
  "developer_message": "Verbose, plain language description of the problem. Provide developers suggestions about how to solve their problems here",
  "user_message": "This is a message that can be passed along to end-users, if needed.",
  "error_code": "40001",
  "more_info": "http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444"
}

💡 Changing the keys may take your responses out of the WhiteHouse Standards.