Responder

A Laravel 4 wrapper for Fractal to handle API responses. For Laravel 5, please go here.

Installation

Add Responder to your composer.json file by running the following command:

$ composer require divspace/responder

Then run the following command:

$ composer update

Register Package

Add the following line to the end of the providers array in app/config/app.php:

'providers' => array(
    // ...
    'Divspace\Responder\ResponderServiceProvider'
)

Usage

There are three types of responses you can return:

1. Item
2. Collection
3. Paginated Collection

Here are examples of all three types in a single controller:

use Divspace\Responder\Responder;
use Data\Transformers\UserTransformer;

class UserController extends BaseController {
    protected $response;

    public function __construct(Responder $response) {
        $this->response = $response;

        /**
         * Fractal parseIncludes() method
         * http://fractal.thephpleague.com/transformers/
         */
        if(isset($_GET['include'])) {
            $this->response->parseIncludes($_GET['include']);
        }
    }

    /**
     * Display a paginated list of users
     */
    public function index() {
        return $this->response->paginatedCollection(User::paginate());
    }

    /**
     * Display a single user
     */
    public function item($id) {
        return $this->response->item(User::find($id), new UserTransformer());
    }

    /**
     * Display all users
     */
    public function collection() {
        return $this->response->collection(User::all(), new UserTransformer());
    }
}

The Data\Transformers\UserTransformers file might look something like this (with an example of how to use the parseIncludes() method from the previous example):

<?php namespace Data\Transformers;

use User;
use League\Fractal\TransformerAbstract;

class UserTransformer extends TransformerAbstract {

    protected $defaultIncludes = [
        'user_type'
    ];

    public function transform(User $user) {
        $user = User::find($user->id);

        return [
            'id'         => (int) $user->id,
            'email'      => $user->email,
            'created_at' => $user->created_at,
            'updated_at' => $user->updated_at,
        ];
    }

    public function includeUserType(User $user) {
        $userType = $user->type;

        return $this->item($userType, new UserTypeTransformer);
    }

}

Since we've used the parseIncludes() method in the previous example, we need to create that file as well so we can return more information in our API response:

<?php namespace Data\Transformers;

use User;
use League\Fractal\TransformerAbstract;

class UserTypeTransformer extends TransformerAbstract {

    public function transform($userType) {
        if(count($userType) > 0) {
            return [
                'id'   => (int) $userType->id,
                'name' => $userType->name
            ];
        }

        return [];
    }

}

You'll want to refer to the full Fractal documentation to get an idea of how everything works together.

Credit

This is modified fork of Larasponse for Laravel 4.2 that uses Fractal as the default provider for API responses.