[question] What is the good practice to create custom route (POST/PUT/GET) with nested entities, keeping in mind web-performance (less http calls is better) ?

[Rebolon]

Hi,

In my application, i take care of web-performance and when it's possible i try to do the less HTTP calls. So when i create a POST/PUT route i want to send all entities at the same time. For instance the process i can see in different sample is that i must create first sub-entities and then the main one.

Here is the model:

So to create a new Book my UI has one form that allows to:

• add Book informations
• select Editors or ceate new one (no limit)
• add ProjectBookEdition information related to the editors
• select Authors or create new one (max 3 authors)
• select Serie or create a new one

To keep best performance, all creation operation (editors, authors, serie) are done locally, in the browser. When the user validate the form, then i want to do only one HTTP call. And that's where i wonder what are the best pratices:

• use custom operations ? but i don't find how to manage this.
• use DTO ? same thing, should i do a custom entity not related to doctrine and then manage everything manually ?
• use a specific controller outside the Api-platform (and this time i know exactly how to do this) ?

I wonder how to do this on REST and GraphQL (because on GraphQL you recently decided to use IRIS for nested object in mutations, which require to create all sub-objects first).

This question about good practices is also available for GET operations because sometime (not evry time) i want to get all informations about a book (except reviews) with only one HTTP call. If i use API-Platform standard i have to do nth call for each IRIS found in sub-entities. I tried custom operations but i'm not really satified by my implementation. Shoul i use the normalization_context to embed full data from nested entities ?

Thanks for help, becasue i saw few questions about those good practices on StackOverflow, and there is no answaer for instance.

[Rebolon]

I want to bring more information about the POST Operation: here is the kind of request i want to do

• HTTP POST on the book endoint (book is a Doctrine Entity and also declared as ApiResource)
• Raw content of the post:

  {
  "book": {
      "title": "test depuis special4",
      "editors": [{
          "publication_date": "1519664915", 
          "collection": "Hachette collection bis", 
          "isbn": "2-87764-257-7", 
          "editor": {
              "name": "JeanPaul Edition"
          }
      }, {
          "publication_date": "1519747464", 
          "collection": "Ma Tu vue", 
          "isbn": "2-87764-257-7", 
          "editor": {
              "name": "JeanPaul Edition"
          }
      }],
      "authors": [{
          "role": {
              "translation_key": "WRITER"
          }, 
          "author": {
              "firstname": "Marc", 
              "lastname": "Douche"
          }
      }, {
          "role": {
              "translation_key": "DRAWER"
          }, 
          "author": {
              "firstname": "Paul", 
              "lastname": "TRUC"
          }
      }],
      "serie": {
          "name": "ouaou ma serie"
      }
  }
  }

  So for this request i want to create all related entities: Author, Authors (which are ProjectBookCreation Entity), Editor, Editors (which are ProjectBookEdition Entity, Serie, Role (which is Job Entity), and Book.

For instance i didn't found the way of doing that kind of thing throuht ApiPlatform so i just added a new itemsOperations on Book Entity and a new Action BookSpecial with the related method. This method has a Route annotation to map the itemsOperations of the Eneity. It also has a ParamConverter that will transform the json content into a full Book Entity. Then the action only has to use the new Book built by the ParamConverter to persist into the DB and return a JSONResponse with the serialized book. In this operation: i don't follow ApiPlatform in fact. I don't manage all format like ApiPlatform does. The Swagger API is not up to date. It references the new route but the description is wrong. And for instance i don't manage nested entity that contains IRIS (so i don't need to create them but just link them with related entity) and i don't validate the json against a Validator or JsonSchema, and i don't manage Exception from ParamConverter (how to manage them as an HTTPException to auto send the HTTP response based on the format).

So The original question would be: does ApiPlatform can help me on that kind of request ? and how ?

edit: all code that represent my above explanation is available here https://github.com/Rebolon/php-sf-flex-webpack-encore-vuejs/tree/master/ in src/Action folder and the param converter has been extracted into its own repository: https://github.com/Rebolon/ApiJsonParamConverterComponent/tree/master/src