README

REST API Response Builder for Laravel

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Why should I use it?
• Usage examples
• Features
• Documentation
• Requirements
• Installation and Configuration
• Bugs reports and pull requests
• License
• Changelog

Upgrading from previous version? Check compatibility docs prior altering your composer.json!

Introduction

ResponseBuilder is a Laravel helper designed to build nice, normalized and easy to consume REST API JSON responses.

Benefits

ResponseBuilder is written for REST API developers by REST API developer and is based on my long lasting experience on both "sides" (API dev and API consumer) of variety of REST APIs. Lightweight, with simple to use public methods, covering multiple potential use-cases, on-the-fly data conversion, localization support, automatic error message building, support for chained APIs and (hopefully) exhaustive documentation. But that's not all! The JSON structure produced by ResponseBuilder is designed with users of your API in mind, which helps them easily deal with your API with ease. They get simple, well defined and predictable JSON structure responses with all the fields needed to consume it without any unnecessary a hassle nor other trickery.

Android developers can use ApiResponse library to handle ResponseBuilder responses produced in their mobile applications.

You are even covered in a case of emergency as provided Exception Handler ensures your API keeps talking JSON (and not HTML) to its clients if case of any unexpected and unhandled exception.

Did I mention, you also get testing traits that would automatically cover your whole ResponseBuilder related code with unit tests with just a few lines of code?

Usage examples

Operation successful? Conclude your controller method with:

return ResponseBuilder::success();

and your client will get nice JSON like

{
  "success": true,
  "code": 0,
  "locale": "en",
  "message": "OK",
  "data": null
}

Something went wrong? Just type:

return ResponseBuilder::error(250);

The following JSON response will then be returned:

{
   "success": false,
   "code": 250,
   "locale": "en",
   "message": "Your error message for code 250",
   "data": null
}

Nice and easy! And yes, message can be easily customized! Also there're much, much more you can do with rich ResponseBuilder API. See library documentation for details and more examples!

Features

• Easy to use,
• Stable and production ready,
• On-the-fly data object conversion,
• API chaining support,
• Localization support,
• Provides traits to help unit test your API code,
• Comes with exception handler helper to ensure your API stays consumable even in case of unexpected,
• No additional dependencies.

License

• Written and copyrighted ©2016-2020 by Marcin Orlowski <mail (#) marcinorlowski (.) com>
• ResponseBuilder is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license