Security note: As of Services Views 7.x-1.3 it is recommend that you only use the module to create services using the "Services" display method described in the 2nd 1/2 of this video. You can read more about this change here.

All the power of views made available to your API. Really, what else is there to say? In this lesson Joe walks through installation and basic configuration of the services views module which provides the ability to expose views as resources via the services module.

Additional resources

Services Views Module

In addition to using views to expose lists of things via our API we can also take advantage of views exposed filters to allow API consumers more control over the data they are receiving in a request. In this lesson Joe looks at accessing views exposed filters via REST requests by adding an exposed filter to both of the perviously created views and then walking through how the configuration of the view changes the behavior of the filter when used via the services API.

In addition to the built in support for core's data and actions the services module also provides a robust framework for exposing the data and actions of our custom modules as an API. In this lesson Joe writes a basic module which creates a custom resource for saving and retrieving a "checked in" status for an authenticated user.

Example commands:

Check a user's status

curl http://localhost/demos/services-7x-test/docroot/api/v1/drupalsquare/1 -H "Accept: application/json"

Check-in a user

curl http://localhost/demos/services-7x-test/docroot/api/v1/drupalsquare/checkin -X POST -H "Content-type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json" -d '{"uid":1}'

Additional resources

Creating a resoruce for Services 3.x

An API that exposes data and actions to a 3rd party is only as good as the documentation for that API. Without good documentation no one will be able to make use of the API you just spent so much energy creating. In this lesson Joe shows some of his favorite API documentation examples and then walks through creating some basic documentation for the resource we created in the previous lesson.

Additional resources

Example - GitHub API Documentation

Example - Recurly Documentation

http://apiary.io - tool to assit in writing good documentation

In this lesson Joe will demontrate using additional parameters and arguments to refine the returned data when making requests from our API. As well as walking through the code that shows where the various parameters are defined and how you can find what options are available. Finally, we install the services tools module which provides some additional documentation.

Additional resources

Services Tools

Services implements resources for all of core's basic data types but sometimes the information returned in the response is either to much or to little and we want to make changes to the response data. In this lesson Joe will look at how we can write a simple custom module that implments basic hooks provided by the services module to allow us to alter the response returned by a request to the node resource.

Most of the actions we want to perform and data we want to retrieve from an API is likely restricted to authenticated users. This lesson will outline the process of making an authenticated request and walk the user through the configuration that is required for our services endpoint in order to start allowing session based authentication.

In this lesson Joe walks through making authenticated requests to our API with cURL. Although cURL can be a bit verbose when making authenticated requests it serves as a good way to talk about all the headers that are a required and a lowest common denominator for how you could accomplish authentication in just about any language or application.

Example commands

curl http://services-demo.lan/api/v1/user/login -d '{"name":"admin","pass":"admin"}' -H "Content-type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json"

curl http://services-demo.lan/api/v1/system/connect -X POST

curl http://services-demo.lan/api/v1/system/connect -H "Cookie: SESS60f8c5b86739b7e326223b4ef35867b2=A86XHGJWlnDcMOGcArbOT-qHrsIi5P2NrcoNTXwWluw" -H "X-CSRF-Token: T77haXwD7JKOJsBlKP3p3kLbjQO96bQWvGJAE1_PUZM" -X POST

curl http://services-demo.lan/api/v1/user/login -X POST -H "Content-type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json"

In this lesson Joe walks through making authenticated requests using the Chrome REST Console Plugin

Additional resources

The Chrome plugin demonstrated in this video is no longer available but there are many alternatives available. Use Postman or search for "REST client" to find tooling options.

This lesson walks through defining the URL that will serve as the endpoint for your API as well as all the basic configuration for your new services endpoint with the exception of resource configuration which is covered in the following lesson.

Additional resources

Setting up a basic endpoint

The services module exposes most of Drupal core's data as resources and provides CRUD operations and additional actions for each. In this lesson Joe will look at the available resources, talk about the various CRUD operations and actions and then enable the node resource and demonstrate retrieving node data as JSON from the services endpoint.

Additional resources

JSON Formatter - Chrome plugin to display results of a JSON request in a nicer way.