Data Persisters

To mutate the application states during POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE operations, API Platform uses classes called data persisters. Data persisters receive an instance of the class marked as an API resource (usually using the @ApiResource annotation). This instance contains data submitted by the client during the deserialization process.

A data persister using Doctrine ORM is included with the library and is enabled by default. It is able to persist and delete objects that are also mapped as Doctrine entities.

However, you may want to:

• store data to other persistence layers (ElasticSearch, MongoDB, external web services…)
• not publicly expose the internal model mapped with the database through the API
• use a separate model for read operations and for updates by implementing patterns such as CQRS

Custom data persisters can be used to do so. A project can include as many data persisters as it needs. The first able to persist data for a given resource will be used.

Creating a Custom Data Persister

To create a data persister, you have to implement the DataPersisterInterface. This interface defines only 3 methods:

• persist: to create or update the given data
• delete: to delete the given data
• support: checks whether the given data is supported by this data persister

Here is an implementation example:

namespace App\DataPersister;

use ApiPlatform\Core\DataPersister\DataPersisterInterface;
use App\Entity\BlogPost;

final class BlogPostDataPersister implements DataPersisterInterface
{
    public function supports($data): bool
    {
        return $data instanceof BlogPost;
    }
    
    public function persist($data)
    {
      // call your persistence layer to save $data
      return $data;
    }
    
    public function delete($data): void
    {
      // call your persistence layer to delete $data
    }
}

If service autowiring and autoconfiguration are enabled (they are by default), you are done!

Otherwise, if you use a custom dependency injection configuration, you need to register the corresponding service and add the api_platform.data_persister tag. The priority attribute can be used to order persisters.

# api/config/services.yaml
services:
    # ...
    'App\DataPersister\BlogPostDataPersister': ~
        # Uncomment only if autoconfiguration is disabled
        #tags: [ 'api_platform.data_persister' ]