Getting Started

# Installation

Install the skeleton and the library:

Start by installing the Yarn package manager (NPM is also supported) and the Create React App tool.

Then, create a new React application for your admin:

$ create-react-app my-admin

Now, go to the newly created my-admin directory:

$ cd my-admin

Finally, install the @api-platform/admin library:

$ yarn add @api-platform/admin

# Creating the Admin

Edit the src/App.js file like the following:

import React from 'react';
import { HydraAdmin } from '@api-platform/admin';

export default () => <HydraAdmin entrypoint="https://demo.api-platform.com"/>; // Replace with your own API entrypoint

Be sure to make your API send proper CORS HTTP headers to allow the admin’s domain to access it. To do so, update the value of the CORS_ALLOW_ORIGIN parameter in api/.env (it will be set to ^https?://localhost:?[0-9]*$ by default).

If you’re not using the API Platform distribution, you will need to adjust the NelmioCorsBundle configuration to expose the Link HTTP header and to send proper CORS headers on the route under which the API will be served (/api by default). Here is a sample configuration (if you use the API Platform distribution, you can skip this step):

# config/packages/nelmio-cors.yaml

nelmio_cors:
    paths:
        '^/api/':
            origin_regex: true
            allow_origin: ['^http://localhost:[0-9]+'] # You probably want to change this regex to match your real domain
            allow_methods: ['GET', 'OPTIONS', 'POST', 'PUT', 'PATCH', 'DELETE']
            allow_headers: ['Content-Type', 'Authorization']
            expose_headers: ['Link']
            max_age: 3600

Clear the cache to apply this change:

$ docker-compose exec php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod

Your new administration interface is ready! Type yarn start to try it!

Note: if you don’t want to hardcode the API URL, you can use an environment variable.

# Customizing the Admin

The API Platform’s admin parses the Hydra documentation exposed by the API and transforms it to an object data structure. This data structure can be customized to add, remove or customize resources and properties. To do so, we can leverage the AdminBuilder component provided by the library. It’s a lower level component than the HydraAdmin one we used in the previous example. It allows to access to the object storing the structure of admin’s screens.

# Using Custom Components

In the following example, we change components used for the description property of the books resource to ones accepting HTML (respectively RichTextField that renders HTML markup and RichTextInput, a WYSWYG editor). (To use the RichTextInput, the ra-input-rich-text package is must be installed: yarn add ra-input-rich-text).

import React from 'react';
import { RichTextField } from 'react-admin';
import RichTextInput from 'ra-input-rich-text';
import { HydraAdmin } from '@api-platform/admin';
import parseHydraDocumentation from '@api-platform/api-doc-parser/lib/hydra/parseHydraDocumentation';

const entrypoint = 'https://demo.api-platform.com';

const myApiDocumentationParser = entrypoint => parseHydraDocumentation(entrypoint)
  .then( ({ api }) => {
    const books = api.resources.find(({ name }) => 'books' === name);
    const description = books.fields.find(f => 'description' === f.name);

    description.input = props => (
      <RichTextInput {...props} source="description" />
    );

    description.input.defaultProps = {
      addField: true,
      addLabel: true
    };
    
    return { api };
  })
;

export default (props) => <HydraAdmin apiDocumentationParser={myApiDocumentationParser} entrypoint={entrypoint}/>;

The field property of the Field class allows to set the component used to render a property in list and show screens. The input property allows to set the component to use to render the input used in create and edit screens.

Any field or input provided by the React Admin library can be used.

To go further, take a look to the “Including react-admin on another React app” documentation page of React Admin to learn how to use directly redux, react-router, and redux-saga along with components provided by this library.

# Managing Files and Images

In the following example, we will:

find every ImageObject resources. For each contentUrl fields, we will use ImageField as field and ImageInput as input.
ImageInput will return a File instance. In this example, we will send a multi-part form data to a special action (https://demo.api-platform.com/images/upload). The action will return the ID of the uploaded image. We will “replace” the File instance by the ID in normalizeData.
As contentUrl fields will return a string, we have to convert Hydra data to React Admin data. This action will be done by denormalizeData.

import React from 'react';
import { FunctionField, ImageField, ImageInput, RichTextField } from 'react-admin';
import RichTextInput from 'ra-input-rich-text';
import { HydraAdmin } from '@api-platform/admin';
import parseHydraDocumentation from '@api-platform/api-doc-parser/lib/hydra/parseHydraDocumentation';

const entrypoint = 'https://demo.api-platform.com';

const myApiDocumentationParser = entrypoint => parseHydraDocumentation(entrypoint)
  .then( ({ api }) => {

    const books = api.resources.find(({ name }) => 'books' === name);
    const description = books.fields.find(f => 'description' === f.name);

    description.input = props => (
      <RichTextInput {...props} source="description" />
    );

    description.input.defaultProps = {
      addField: true,
      addLabel: true,
    };

    api.resources.map(resource => {
      if ('http://schema.org/ImageObject' === resource.id) {
        resource.fields.map(field => {
          if ('http://schema.org/contentUrl' === field.id) {
            field.denormalizeData = value => ({
              src: value
            });

            field.fieldComponent = (
              <FunctionField
                key={field.name}
                render={
                  record => (
                    <ImageField key={field.name} record={record} source={`${field.name}.src`}/>
                  )
                }
                source={field.name}
              />
            );

            field.inputComponent = (
              <ImageInput accept="image/*" key={field.name} multiple={false} source={field.name}>
                <ImageField source="src"/>
              </ImageInput>
            );

            field.normalizeData = value => {
              if (value[0] && value[0].rawFile instanceof File) {
                const body = new FormData();
                body.append('file', value[0].rawFile);

                return fetch(`${entrypoint}/images/upload`, { body, method: 'POST' })
                  .then(response => response.json());
              }

              return value.src;
            };
          }

          return field;
        });
      }

      return resource;
    });

    return { api };
  })
;

export default (props) => <HydraAdmin apiDocumentationParser={myApiDocumentationParser} entrypoint={entrypoint}/>;

Note: In this example, we choose to send the file via a multi-part form data, but you are totally free to use another solution (like base64). But keep in mind that multi-part form data is the most efficient solution.

# Using a Custom Validation Function or Inject Custom Props

You can use fieldProps and inputProps to respectively inject custom properties to fields and inputs generated by API Platform Admin. This is particularly useful to add custom validation rules:

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { AdminBuilder, hydraClient } from 'api-platform-admin';
import parseHydraDocumentation from 'api-doc-parser/lib/hydra/parseHydraDocumentation';

const entrypoint = 'https://demo.api-platform.com';

export default class extends Component {
  state = {api: null};

  componentDidMount() {
    parseHydraDocumentation(entrypoint).then( ({ api }) =>  => {
      const books = api.resources.find(r => 'books' === r.name);

      books.writableFields.find(f => 'description' === f.name).inputProps = {
        validate: value => value.length >= 30 ? undefined : 'Minimum length: 30';
      };

      this.setState({api: api});
      
      return { api };
    });
  }

  render() {
    if (null === this.state.api) return <div>Loading...</div>;

    return <AdminBuilder api={this.state.api} dataProvider={hydraClient(entrypoint)}/>
  }
}