Content Negotiation

The API system has builtin content negotiation capabilities. It leverages the willdurand/negotiation library.

By default, only the JSON-LD format is enabled. However API Platform Core supports many more formats and can be extended.

The framework natively supports JSON-LD, HAL, raw JSON, XML, YAML and CSV (YAML and CSV support is only available if you use Symfony 3.2+).

Both XML and JSON formats are experimental and there are no assurance that we will not break them.

API Platform Core will automatically detect the best resolving format depending on:

• enabled formats (see below)
• the requested format, specified in either the Accept HTTP header or as an extension appended to the URL

Available formats are:

If the client requested format is not specified (if it’s not supported, it will throw an HTTP bad format error), the response format will be the first format defined in the formats configuration key (see below). An example using the builtin XML support is available in Behat specs.

The API Platform content negotiation system is extendable. Support for other formats (such as JSONAPI) can be added by creating and registering appropriate encoders and, sometimes, normalizers. Adding support for other standard hypermedia formats upstream is welcome. Don’t hesitate to contribute by adding your encoders and normalizers to API Platform Core.

Enabling Several Formats

The first required step is to configure allowed formats. The following configuration will enable the support of XML (built-in) and of a custom format called myformat and having application/vnd.myformat as MIME type.

# app/config/config.yml
api_platform:
    # ...

    formats:
        jsonld:   ['application/ld+json']
        jsonhal:  ['application/hal+json']
        json:     ['application/json']
        xml:      ['application/xml', 'text/xml']
        html:     ['text/html']
        myformat: ['application/vnd.myformat']

Because the Symfony Serializer component is able to serialize objects in XML, sending an Accept HTTP header with the text/xml string as value is enough to retrieve XML documents from our API. However API Platform knows nothing about the myformat format. We need to register an encoder and optionally a normalizer for this format.

Registering a Custom Serializer

If you are adding support for a format not supported by default by API Platform nor by the Symfony Serializer Component, you need to create custom encoder, decoder and eventually a normalizer and a denormalizer. Refer to the Symfony documentation to learn how to create and register such classes.

API Platform Core will automatically call the serializer with your defined format name (myformat in previous examples) as format parameter during the deserialization process. Then it will return the result to the client with the asked MIME type using its built-in responder.

Writing a Custom Normalizer

Using composition is the recommended way to implement a custom normalizer. You can use the following template to start with your own implementation of CustomItemNormalizer:

# app/config/services.yml
services:
# ...

    'AppBundle\Serializer\CustomItemNormalizer':
        arguments: [ '@api_platform.serializer.normalizer.item' ]
        tags: [ 'serializer.normalizer' ]

<?php
// src/AppBundle/Serializer/CustomItemNormalizer.php

namespace AppBundle\Serializer;

use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Normalizer\DenormalizerInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Normalizer\NormalizerInterface;

final class CustomItemNormalizer implements NormalizerInterface, DenormalizerInterface
{
    private $normalizer;

    public function __construct(NormalizerInterface $normalizer)
    {
        if (!$normalizer instanceof DenormalizerInterface) {
            throw new \InvalidArgumentException('The normalizer must implement the DenormalizerInterface');
        }

        $this->normalizer = $normalizer;
    }

    public function denormalize($data, $class, $format = null, array $context = [])
    {
        return $this->normalizer->denormalize($data, $class, $format, $context);
    }

    public function supportsDenormalization($data, $type, $format = null)
    {
        return $this->normalizer->supportsDenormalization($data, $type, $format);
    }

    public function normalize($object, $format = null, array $context = [])
    {
        return $this->normalizer->normalize($object, $format, $context);
    }

    public function supportsNormalization($data, $format = null)
    {
        return $this->normalizer->supportsNormalization($data, $format);
    }
}

For example if you want to make the csv format work for even complex entities with a lot of hierarchy, you have to flatten or remove too complex relations:

<?php
// src/AppBundle/Serializer/CustomItemNormalizer.php

namespace AppBundle\Serializer;

use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Normalizer\DenormalizerInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Normalizer\NormalizerInterface;

class CustomItemNormalizer implements NormalizerInterface, DenormalizerInterface
{
    // ...

    public function normalize($object, $format = null, array $context = [])
    {
        $result = $this->normalizer->normalize($object, $format, $context);

        if ('csv' !== $format || !is_array($result)) {
            return $result;
        }

        foreach ($result as $key => $value) {
            if (is_array($value) && array_keys(array_keys($value)) === array_keys($value)) {
                unset($result[$key]);
            }
        }

        return $result;
    }

    // ...
}