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Routes
5:09In this section, we’ll learn how we access and display specific data using Resources for our Authors and Books resources.
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Welcome back.
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We've created our resource controllers,
validated requests and
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finally, we returned responses for both
the author controller and book controller.
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In this section, we'll learn how we can
access specific data using resources.
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Then we'll build a few basic routes so we
can test our authors and books resources.
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Finally, we'll test our API so
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we can verify the resources are displaying
the correct data as expected.
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Why exactly do we want to use resources?
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To answer this question,
we'll examine each piece of data and
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decide which specific pieces will
be displayed to the API consumer.
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For example,
it's best practice to hide author IDs,
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timestamps, and passwords because
we don't want to share sensitive or
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irrelevant data to the users of our API.
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It's also worth noting that exposing
author IDs can give your API consumers
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an idea of the size of your database,
which you may not want to make public.
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Similarly, exposing timestamps
to end users of our API
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is also not a common practice
simply because it's not relevant
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to the end users who are accessing
authors and their books.
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Last but not least,
you don't want to display passwords and
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other sensitive data so
we'll explore how to use resources,
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to expose only the data we want
to display to our API consumers.
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Before we can create resources
to show specific data,
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we will need to build some basic
routing so we can test and
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verify exactly what data is
being exposed by the resource.
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First, navigate to the routes directory
and open the api.php file inside.
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Since we're building a REST API, we'll use
the api.php file instead of the web.php
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file, which is used for building web apps
like we did in the Laravel basics course.
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Next, delete the existing route and
let's create both the authors and
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books routes with a get request like this.
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Next, let's navigate to
the app/http/controllersdirectory and
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open the AuthorController.php file.
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The route we just created,
will access the @index function inside of
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the AuthorController.php file,
and will return all authors
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along with a status code of 200,
which means the request was successful.
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We can verify this behavior using
a super handy artisan command like this.
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This command shows all of
the routes used by our API.
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Super handy!
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Next, let's run the php artisan serve
command and be sure to use two terminals,
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so we can continue working on our
API while we test our routes.
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To open a new terminal,
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click on the plus sign next to
the current terminal like this.
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Finally, let's test our routes and
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see if we get the data that we
expect from the index function.
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All authors and a status code of 200 for
success like this.
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Open the welcome view and
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click on the authors which will
test the following routes.
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And will show us all authors.
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Next, try the books route like this.
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And you will see a list of books.
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If you saw both lists of authors and
books, way to go.
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Otherwise, check your route and author
controller for typos or missing steps.
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Great, we are now exposing only the data
we actually want to return to our
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API consumers.
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Without any of the database specific data,
mission accomplished.
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Now that our author controller at index
function is done, let's start working
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on the author controller at show
function in the next section.
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See you there.
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