Connect Yii2 to another RESTful application - rest

Question

I have a Yii2 application. I would like to connect it to another restful webpage. So user will send data to my application, I will send them via POST request and do something according to a JSON response. How can I do the send a request / fetch response part in a yii2?

Answer 1

The best method would be to use curl to make end to end calls to your RESTful API, in which case you may be interested in checking out a yii2 extension for curl.
Without a Yii2 extension, we can accomplish this by creating a more general function in a controller or more preferably a model (for shared access) as exampled below:
/**
* $method e.g POST, GET, PUT
* $data = [
'param' => 'value',
]
*/
public function curlToRestApi($method, $url, $data = null)
{
$curl = curl_init();
// switch $method
switch ($method) {
case 'POST':
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
if($data !== null) {
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
}
break;
// logic for other methods of interest
// .
// .
// .
default:
if ($data !== null){
$url = sprintf("%s?%s", $url, http_build_query($data));
}
}
// Authentication [Optional]
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "username:password");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
return $result;
}
We then call this function on a need basis i.e. depending on the method and url and/or data.
It is also conveniently easy to use file_get_contents if fopen wrapper is enabled in order to access Web Service URLs.
$response = file_get_contents('http://example.com/path/to/api?param1=stack&param2=overflow');
If a JSON response is served, you can recover the php array as follows:
$response = json_decode($response, TRUE);
If an XML response is returned, then
$response = new \SimpleXMLElement($response);
However, if the API endpoint returns an HTTP error status, the file_get_contents function fails with a warning and returns null.