How to retrieve member list from Silverstripe API - silverstripe

Question

I am developing a platform and I need to get the members emails from an existing Silverstripe installation. I think it is V4 but not sure yet.
I was hoping to call a REST API but I can't seem to find any information about how you would go about doing this. I would need to call this each day to get the latest members.
Is this possible or is there another way to go about doing this?
I had a look at the API documentation but the information is not helpful and it does not have an explanations or examples. https://api.silverstripe.org/4/index.html

Answer 1

Silverstripe 4 does not expose its data through a REST API service out of the box. We can install a module to allow us to do this.
Rest API module:
https://github.com/colymba/silverstripe-restfulapi
Rest API module:
https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-restfulserver
An alternative is to use the Silverstripe GraphQL module to retrieve data:
https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql

Answer 2

You can do this almost out of the box with the SilverStripe GraphQL API in SilverStripe 4. In addition to 3dgoo's answer, here's a bit of a guide for you:
Out of the box configuration
SilverStripe exposes an "admin" GraphQL server, which requires you to be logged in to use it. If you want to use it from another server, you can base64 encode your basic authentication credentials and pass it as a header. More info on this here.
The SilverStripe CMS module already exposes member's first and last names, since they're used by parts of the CMS through the GraphQL API already. If you want an email address then you can add that with some basic YAML in your app folder.
Adding the member's email field
Add some custom configuration to your app/_config folder - configuration in SilverStripe is merged, so the array values fields: [Email] will merge with the CMS values linked above
# File: app/_config/graphql.yml
---
Name: appgraphql
---
SilverStripe\GraphQL\Manager:
schemas:
admin:
scaffolding:
types:
SilverStripe\Security\Member:
fields: [Email]
operations:
read: true
Note that I've also added operations.read: true to this, because the CMS will only let you read members one at a time via the readOne operation. For your case you'll want to enable read, which returns a paginated list. More info on available operations.
Testing your query
The easiest way to do this is to install GraphiQL (via silverstripe-graphql-devtools), a web (or app) based UI for inspecting GraphQL schemas and running queries against your server. This can be done easily with Composer:
composer require --dev silverstripe/graphql-devtools dev-master
Open up your browser to http://localhost/dev/graphiql?flush. Replace localhost with whatever your SilverStripe server is running on. You add ?flush to the querystring to tell SilverStripe to flush its cache (YAML and PHP files) to pick up your new module and config.
When you get your GraphiQL query editor you can start by writing query GetUsers { ... } and you'll notice that as you type deeper into the query it autocompletes the available options for you.
Here's the query to retrieve your member email addresses:
query GetUserEmails {
readSilverStripeMembers {
edges {
node {
Email
}
}
}
}
Micro-explanation: GetUserEmails is an arbitrary query name you create. You don't actually need to write one, it'll work fine without. readSilverStripeMembers is an automatically scaffolded query name, which happens because you enabled read: true in the GraphQL operations. If you delete it and start typing it again you'll see the other options available as well, the one that ships out of the box with the CMS is readOneSilverStripeMember. The edges and node levels are for pagination.
Using the query
It sounds to me like your SilverStripe server is already running somewhere, and you may not have a local version to test. If that's the case, simply adding the YAML configuration above to your app folder and deploying it will be enough to get your server to give member emails in admin GraphQL calls, then you can do your GraphQL queries with cURL or something:
curl 'http://localhost/admin/graphql/' \ # Adjust to your domain
-H 'Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=' \ # This is admin:admin base64 encoded
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ # Required for the input data structure
--data-binary '{"query":"query { readSilverStripeMembers { edges { node { Email } } } }","variables":null}'
Example output:
{
"data": {
"readSilverStripeMembers": {
"edges": [
{
"node": {
"Email": "leslie.lawless#example.com"
}
},
{
"node": {
"Email": "mika#example.com"
}
},
{
"node": {
"Email": "sam#example.com"
}
}
]
}
}
}