RESTful API: Data from multiple endpoints in one single view - php

Question

I've started creating a RESTful API (well, I did my best, I'm trying to follow the patterns) and I have stumbled upon a scenario that I'm not really sure how to handle. I will explain the current structure:
My application has 4 controllers:
Customers
Payments
Log
Taking as example the Customers controller, I have defined the following actions:
GET /customers: returns a list of customers
POST /customers: creates a new customer
GET /customers/{id}: returns the customer with the provided id
PUT /customers/{id}: updates the customer with the provided id
DELETE /customers/{id}: destroys the customer
This is the full code of the Customer controller:
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use App\Customer;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
class CustomerController extends Controller
{
/**
* Display a listing of the resource.
*
* #return \Illuminate\Http\Response
*/
public function index()
{
return Customer::all();
}
/**
* Store a newly created resource in storage.
*
* #param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
* #return \Illuminate\Http\Response
*/
public function store(Request $request)
{
$customer = Customer::create($request->all());
return response()->json($customer, 201);
}
/**
* Display the specified resource.
*
* #param \App\Customer $customer
* #return \Illuminate\Http\Response
*/
public function show(Customer $customer)
{
return $customer;
}
/**
* Update the specified resource in storage.
*
* #param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
* #param \App\Customer $customer
* #return \Illuminate\Http\Response
*/
public function update(Request $request, Customer $customer)
{
$customer->update($request->all());
return response()->json($customer, 200);
}
/**
* Remove the specified resource from storage.
*
* #param \App\Customer $customer
* #return \Illuminate\Http\Response
*/
public function destroy(Customer $customer)
{
$customer->delete();
return response()->json(null, 204);
}
}
The code is very similar in the other controllers. It's also important to note that:
A Customer can have multiple Payments
A Customer can have multiple records in the Log
The problem starts here:
I need to display in the front-end a summary page with all customer data (name, email, registration date, etc) and a box showing the number of payments made and another box showing the number of entries in the Log.
Do I need to make 3 requests? (One to /customers/id, other to customers/id/payments and other to customers/id/logs)
If I return all the customer related data in the customers/id call, am I breaking the RESTful convention?

Answer 1

I am using apigility, but my answer still will be related to your question. According to the REST terminology (which could be find here https://apigility.org/documentation/intro/first-rest-service#terminology ) You are talking about entity and collection.
/customers/id - entity,
/customers/id/payments - collection,
/customers/id/logs - collection.
These are 3 different requests. So, yes, you need make 3 different requests.
But, to be honest, if you don't need pagination over payments and logs you can have only one request to /customers/id and within response you can have fields with array
{
"_links": {
"self": {
"href": "http://localhost:8080/status/3c10c391-f56c-4d04-a889-bd1bd8f746f0"
}
},
"id": "3c10c391-f56c-4d04-a889-bd1bd8f746f0",
...
_payments: [
...
],
_logs: [
...
],
}
Upd (duplicate from comment for future visitors).
Also, you should pay attention to DTO. I suppose this link will be interesting https://stackoverflow.com/a/36175349/1581741 .
Upd2.
At current moment I treat your collection /customers/id/payments like this:
/payments?user_id=123
where user_id is filtering field on payments table.

Answer 2

I think your problem that you confuse your REST API with your database. They don't have to follow the same structure. You can easily return the whole nested JSON for GET /customers/{id} if that's what you need from your REST API.