Get POST body data in Silex RESTful API - symfony

Question

I am creating a RESTful API using Silex. To test I am using Chrome's "Simple REST Client" addon.
In the addon I set the URL to: http://localhost/api-test/web/v1/clients
I set the "method" to: POST
I leave the "headers" blank
I set the "data" to: name=whatever
In my "clients.php" page I have:
require_once __DIR__.'/../../vendor/autoload.php';
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
$app = new Silex\Application();
$app->post('/clients', function (Request $request) use ($app) {
return new Response('Created client with name: ' . $request->request->get('name'), 201);
}
In the addon, the output shows: "Status: 201" (correct), a bunch of headers, and "Data: Created client with name: " (it should say "Data: Created client with name: whatever"
What am I doing wrong? I also tried: $request->get('name')
Thank you.

Answer 1

Three steps were needed to resolve:
1) In "Simple Rest Client" set the "Headers" to:
Content-Type: application/json
2) Change the "Data" to:
{ "name": "whatever" }
3) In Silex add the code to convert input to JSON, as described at http://silex.sensiolabs.org/doc/cookbook/json_request_body.html:
$app->before(function (Request $request) {
if (strpos($request->headers->get('Content-Type'), 'application/json') === 0) {
$data = json_decode($request->getContent(), true);
$request->request->replace(is_array($data) ? $data : array());
}
});
Then I was able to access the data in my PHP code with:
$request->request->get('name')
Thank you #xabbuh for your help, which led me towards the answer.