Input parsing

info

While Charon was built framework agnostic, in this documentation we assume you are using our Laravel branch.

Input to Resource

In order to translate API input (probably JSON, but could be anything depending on your implementation) into resources, you must set an InputParser in your Context. The InputParser will read content from the request body and translate it to a Resource.

$context = new Context(Action::WRITE);
$context->addInputParser(JsonBodyInputParser::class);

$inputResources = $this->resourceTransformer->fromInput(
    $this->getResourceDefinition(),
    $writeContext,
    $request
);

Note that the transformer returns a collection of Resources.

Input validation

(Look at the next page about Validation to learn how to set this works. For now, let's just get to it.)

foreach ($inputResources as $inputResource) {
    try {
        $inputResource->validate($writeContext);

        // also see if we can create this entity.
        $this->authorizeCreateFromResource($request, $inputResource);

    } catch (ResourceValidationException $e) {
        return $this->getValidationErrorResponse($e);
    }
}

Transform resources to Entities

The magic here happens in the PropertySetter class, which is the opposite of the PropertyGetter as it sets data instead of getting it. Note that we create a second ResourceCollection that holds a new set of Resources that is generated from the newly generated entities, in an INDEX context.

$indexContext = new Context(Action::INDEX);
$createdResources = new ResourceCollection();

foreach ($inputResources as $inputResource) {
    $entity = $this->toEntity($inputResource, $writeContext);
    $entity->save();

    $createdResources->add($this->toResource($entity, $readContext));
}

return new ResourceResponse($createdResources, $readContext);

And there we have it: input transformed to resources, saved in entities and then transformed back into resources.