MXRequestManager-PHP

Note

This is an old README, when the lib wasn't installable by composer. I'm on it, there are only some changes related to autoload,

Required

• PHP >= 5.3
• php-curl (with SSL if required)
• APIs which return JSON encoded data (More structures are coming)
• Brain >= Working

How to download

There are several ways to download MxRequestManager-PHP:

• Install with composer ("max13/rest-manager": "dev-master")
• Clone the github repository with git clone <repo> [<dest>]
• Download the zip file on github directly
• Try to find another one by yourself :/

Then place it where you want (readable location, in order to load it).

How to use

Captain Obvious is so Obvious, that this is truly the most interesting part of the README.

You can find a Doxygen doc somewhere, you'll just see how to basically use the library.

First of all, let's take a simple example. You have your APIs (api.awsome-guy.com) and you want to retrieve a member list from your users resource, with a GET.

JSON string would be:

{
	users:[
		{
			"id": 4,
			"username": "foo"
		}, {
			"id": 12,
			"username": "bar"
		}
	]
}

<?php
// Adapt the path to your installation
require_once('MXRequestManager-PHP/MXRequestManager.php');

// Instanciate the manager, without the triling slash
$mx = new MXRequestManager('http://api.awsome-guy.com');

// Prepare your parameters, i.e a token
$params = array('token' => 'abcdefg');

// Make the request and return the status
$res = $mx->get('/users', $params);
?>

From there, you must verify $res because it can be 3 types (so check the type too with ===)

// MXRequestManager error,
// errno are in the top of the lib file
if ($res === FALSE)
	die('Client error: '.$mx->errno());
if ($res === TRUE) // No JSON, may be a PHP Error
	die('Parse error: '.$mx->response('body'));

And after that and your own checks (for example, if the property errors is present), you can safely use $res as a stdClass:

<?php
echo 'User n0: ' . $res->users[0]->id . "<br />\n";
foreach ($res->users as $user)
	echo $user->id . ' / ' . $user->username . "<br />\n";
?>

And this example will output:

User n0: 4
4 / foo
12 / bar

That's it. You can already use MXRequestManager !

How to check the entire response ?

This is simple, you can call:

<?php
echo $mx->rawResponse();
?>

How to check the headers ?

MXRequestManager is intelligent and smart enough to allow you to check the headers simply.

Here is an example header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2013 21:49:22 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.21
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding

When processed, every line are split and stored in an array, accessible by a key, corresponding to the part before the semicolon (:) of each line, except for the first line which has for key Status and the HTTP code accessible with in Code.

There is an internal multi-dimentional array which contains 2 root keys: headers and body:

• headers contains an associative array of the header's values
• body is the body returned as a string

Nothing better than an example:

<?php
// Adapt the path to your installation
require_once('MXRequestManager-PHP/MXRequestManager.php');

// Instanciate the manager, without the triling slash
$mx = new MXRequestManager('http://api.awsome-guy.com');

// Prepare your parameters, i.e a token
$params = array('token' => 'abcdefg');

// Make the request and return the status
$res = $mx->get('/users', $params);

// MXRequestManager error,
// errno are in the top of the lib file
if ($res === FALSE)
	die('Client error: '.$mx->errno());
if ($res === TRUE) // No JSON, may be a PHP Error
	die('Parse error: '.$mx->response('body'));

echo "HTTP Status: " . $mx->response('headers', 'Status');
echo "<br />\n";
echo "HTTP Code: " . $mx->response('headers', 'Code');
// Since PHP 5.4 you can use $mx->response()['headers']
echo "<br />\n";
echo "Response body: " . $mx->response('body');
?>

Additional notes

A sort of manual will come soon...