Restful API

Start with rest api

We have a table that includes of countries so we create a model that called countrylist model

<?php

namespace app\models;

use Yii;

/**
 * This is the model class for table "countrylist".
 *
 * @property integer $id
 * @property string $iso
 * @property string $name
 * @property string $nicename
 * @property string $iso3
 * @property integer $numcode
 * @property integer $phonecode
 */
class Countrylist extends \yii\db\ActiveRecord
{
    /**
     * @inheritdoc
     */
    public static function tableName()
    {
        return 'countrylist';
    }

    /**
     * @inheritdoc
     */
    public function rules()
    {
        return [
            [['iso', 'name', 'nicename', 'phonecode'], 'required'],
            [['numcode', 'phonecode'], 'integer'],
            [['iso'], 'string', 'max' => 2],
            [['name', 'nicename'], 'string', 'max' => 80],
            [['iso3'], 'string', 'max' => 3]
        ];
    }

    /**
     * @inheritdoc
     */
    public function attributeLabels()
    {
        return [
            'id' => 'ID',
            'iso' => 'Iso',
            'name' => 'Name',
            'nicename' => 'Nicename',
            'iso3' => 'Iso3',
            'numcode' => 'Numcode',
            'phonecode' => 'Phonecode',
        ];
    }
}

and I create rest webservice for that, we create a controller for restapi and set modelClass variable for our model.

 <?php
    namespace app\controllers;
    use yii\rest\ActiveController;
    use Yii;
    class CountrylistController extends ActiveController
    {
      public $modelClass='app\models\Countrylist';
    }
?>

for using restapi we need pretty urls and
we add this rule for pretty url

'urlManager' => [
   'class' => 'yii\web\UrlManager',
   'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
   'showScriptName' => false,
   'rules' => [
       ['class'=>'yii\rest\UrlRule','controller'=>'countrylist']
       ],
    ],

after that we access to can test our rest api as an example

https://localhost/countrylist gives us list of counties.

How to override default actions of rest api Yii2

As an example you want to disable pagination in your default index action and get all results in index. How can you do that? It’s simple. You should override the index action in your controller like this:

public function actions() {
    $actions = parent::actions();
    unset($actions['index']);
    return $actions;
}

public function actionIndex() {
    $activeData = new ActiveDataProvider([
        'query' => \common\models\Yourmodel::find(),
        'pagination' => false
    ]);
    return $activeData;
}

Override Content-Type for specific action

Use case: just one action which should return a plain (text) content as-is:

public function actionAsXML()
{
    $this->layout = false;
    Yii::$app->response->format = Response::FORMAT_XML;

    return ['aaa' => [1, 2, 3, 4]];;
}

Pre-defined response formats are:

FORMAT_HTML
FORMAT_XML
FORMAT_JSON
FORMAT_JSONP
FORMAT_RAW

There is no mime type for text/plain out of the box, use this instead:

public function actionPlainText()
{
    $this->layout = false;
    Yii::$app->response->format = Response::FORMAT_RAW;
    Yii::$app->response->headers->add('Content-Type', 'text/plain');

    return $this->render('plain-text'); // outputs template as plain text
}