Hydrate joined Entities with Api-Platform - symfony

Question

I m building my first rest API with Api-Platform for an AngularJs app,
I want to get all my Project entity like juste here (with my url /projects):
{
"#context": "/contexts/Project",
"#id": "/projects",
"#type": "hydra:PagedCollection",
"hydra:totalItems": 19,
"hydra:itemsPerPage": 30,
"hydra:firstPage": "/projects",
"hydra:lastPage": "/projects",
"hydra:member": [
{
"#id": "/projects/1",
"#type": "Project",
"name": "test1",
"parent": null,
"createdAt": "2014-12-22T11:38:13+01:00",
"updatedAt": null,
"deletedAt": null
},
{
"#id": "/projects/2",
"#type": "Project",
"name": "test2",
"parent": null,
"createdAt": "2014-12-22T17:02:50+01:00",
"updatedAt": null,
"deletedAt": null
},
{
"#id": "/projects/3",
"#type": "Project",
"name": "test3",
"parent": "/projects/2",
"createdAt": "2014-12-22T18:28:50+01:00",
"updatedAt": null,
"deletedAt": null
}
]
}
But as you can see my Projects can have parent, so I got a reference of my parent Project ( like this /projects/2 )
Can I get directly a Project Object in Json instead of reference like this ?
{
"#id": "/projects/3",
"#type": "Project",
"name": "test3",
"parent": {
"#id": "/projects/2",
"#type": "Project",
"name": "test2",
"parent": null,
"createdAt": "2014-12-22T17:02:50+01:00",
"updatedAt": null,
"deletedAt": null
},
"createdAt": "2014-12-22T18:28:50+01:00",
"updatedAt": null,
"deletedAt": null
}
This is a good pratical of Rest APi ?

Answer 1

API Platform has a built-in function for embedding relations in the parent JSON document.
Your entity will look like:
namespace AppBundle\Entity;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Annotation\Groups;
class Project
{
private $id;
/** #Groups({"embed"}) */
private $parent;
/** #Groups({"embed"}) */
private $name;
/** #Groups({"embed"}) */
private $createdAt;
// ...
}
And the service definition:
# app/config/services.yml
services:
# ...
resource.offer:
parent: api.resource
arguments: [ 'AppBundle\Entity\Offer' ]
calls:
- method: initNormalizationContext
arguments: [ { groups: [ embed ] } ]
tags: [ { name: api.resource } ]
Be careful, it will embed the parent as well as the parent of the parent and so on. If you want to change this, you need to create a custom normalizer. It will be more straightforward when Symfony 3.1 will be released thanks to the new #MaxDepth annotation.