Describe the magic of object completition in endpoints

[Martin Keller]

It would be nice to see in the documentation, how objects are completed and how to enable/control this behavior. Maybe I have not yet done enough RTFM, then I apologize.

Background: debugging of a model in an endpoint shows minimal properties. After sending the results out, the resulting JSON is filled with more relevant information to the originalObject. Sometimes so much, that you need a distiller and dotted array notation to only get the relevant-to-you information.

[Martin Keller]

Help! My JSON does not contain the properties I expected!

[David Bascom]

Hello Martin!
Could you give me a more detailled example?

In the most basic usecase with the default settings of EXT:nnrestapi, returning a Model will result in a recursive JSON containing ALL the fields / properties that can be accessed in the Model, e.g.

public function getExampleAction() {
  $model = $this->myrepository->findByUid(1);
  return ['result'=>$model];
}

will return:

{
  "result":
    "uid" => 1,
    "pid" => 2,
    "crdate" => ...,
    "tstamp" => ...,
    "title" => "...",
    "bodytext" => "...",
    // all other properties
}

This is the default and the intended structure. (Note: For recursive Objects, the resulting depth can be limited using an Annotation)

The idea is, that if the frontend modifies the data and uses the identical keys, then EXT:nnrestapi can take care of merging and persisting the modified properties on-the-fly. Becaus the data is merged, note that the frontend doesn’t need to pass all keys back to the POST/PUT Endpoint:

// JSON sent to the PUT/POST-Endpoint that persists the Model in the DB
// e.g. postExampleAction( Example $model )
{
  "uid" => 1,
  "title" => "New title"
}

All existing (persisted) properties of the Model are automatically merged using \nn\t3::Obj( $model )->merge( $arr ).
We have an example here in the docs. Here is the syntax for the Obj->merge() helper method used.

If you would like to reduce the data returned by the REST Api you can use a custom function or one of the distillers shipped with nnrestapi.

Further reading:
- Setting globalDistillers in TypoScript
- Using the Distiller Annotation
- Setting a max depth of the JSON for recursive Objects

[Martin Keller]

Ok, I think the day was too long for me. Works as described!

Now, with distillers new key=>dotted-array-notation, I have ambigous keys which leads to the wish of limiting the added models…
My workaround: build the returned array myself with only needed data. This also saves extending the JSON with a lot of models and distilling them out afterwards.