Managing object's properties with linking and/or resource expansion

[YoruNoHikage]

I'm new to REST and was wondering how to deal with properties that are objects.

I read about linking and resource expansion here : https://stormpath.com/blog/linking-and-resource-expansion-rest-api-tips/

But there's few API like Github (I don't know if it's a good example) that expose more properties when you fetch the object than embedded with another.
See user property on https://api.github.com/users/{user}/repos and https://api.github.com/users/{user}

How to do this ? Is this good or bad practice ?

[Stepan Anchugov]

That's not linking, basically, that's just resource expansion (as it seems to me).

And actually it's OK to use it, though it depends a lot on your use case. For example, the BackboneRelational library for Backbone can be configured so that any embedded objects (or arrays of objects) will be automatically treated as relations, and your client code will have correct relational mappings. Though in some cases you could prefer to fetch these sub-resources manually.

The properties you should expose in embedded resources actually depend on the use case, too. You should figure out what is necessary in each of your cases.

When using FOSRestBundle with JMSSerializer, you can always either configure the serializer so that it fetches and serializes embedded collections into resulting JSON properties:

properties:
        some-property:
            type: Your\Namespace\Entities\SomeEntityToEmbed

In this case serializer shold be configured to serialize the SomeEntityToEmbed, too.

Or you could create an embedded resource action. Doing this is pretty easy with FOSRestBundle, too (see the doc). If you stick with auto-generated routes, that would be pretty easy to implement.

Hope this answers some of your questions.

[YoruNoHikage]

Thanks for this long answer. I haven't thought that we could do as we want depending on the case.
So, I have to redefine another entity to expose less properties, right ?

I also just saw it's possible to filter properties in the entity via the annotation @Groups in JMS.

[Stepan Anchugov]

Well, groups is the way to go here, I think. In your index action you use one serializer group, in show action there's another, then you should edit your serializer configuration so that embedded props are only serialized in show action (or maybe you'll want to do it some other way?)

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