Growing pains building RESTful APIs with Yii2
Update:
The issues discussed in this post were easily resolved and surfaced due to my unfamiliarity with the new version of Yii. Issue one fixed with one line of code. When JSON output is required you can set this by adding a new line into the controller action:
\Yii::$app->response->format = \yii\web\Response::FORMAT_JSON;
Issue two is also easily resolved by creating an actions method in your controller and unsetting the default action that you need.
As most things in software development, the things you’re looking for are a lot easier to find when you have a better idea of what you’re looking for.
Original post:
I have begun playing with Yii2 to build RESTful APIs with the intention of creating backends for single-page websites and mobile apps. Although I am excited at how well Yii2 applications are built I am seeing issues and bugs when following documentation and examples. Unfortunately for me it doesn’t seem that many people are building RESTful apps with Yii2 at this time to ask questions from. Here are some issues that I’m experiencing.
Issue 1
When extending a controller from the RESTful ActiveController the behavior method is no longer available. It triggers an exception with the error:
Response content must not be an array
Is this due to a bug that’s been introduced?
Issue 2
When extending a controller from RESTful ActiveController, the normal action methods are no longer used or can be modified. There doesn’t seem to be a way to add additional functionality because of this such as pagination rules. How would I go about hooking into these actions?
Answers
I feel that the documentation I’m reading is from earlier iterations of Yii2 and not valid for the latest version. I would love to hear from anyone who can shed some light on these issues.
Example I’m referring to
http://www.yiiframework.com/doc-2.0/guide-rest-quick-start.html