Peeps: A demo of JSONAPI-Resources

Peeps is a very basic contact management system implemented as an API that follows the JSON API spec.

Other apps will soon be written to demonstrate writing a consumer for this API.

The instructions below were used to create this app.

Initial Steps to create this app

Create a new Rails application

rails new peeps --skip-javascript

or

rails new peeps -d postgresql --skip-javascript

Create the databases

rake db:create

Add the JSONAPI-Resources gem

Add the gem to your Gemfile

gem 'jsonapi-resources'

Then bundle

bundle

Application Controller

Make the following changes to application_controller.rb

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include JSONAPI::ActsAsResourceController
  
  # Prevent CSRF attacks by raising an exception.
  # For APIs, you may want to use :null_session instead.
  protect_from_forgery with: :null_session
end

OR

class ApplicationController < JSONAPI::ResourceController
  # Prevent CSRF attacks by raising an exception.
  # For APIs, you may want to use :null_session instead.
  protect_from_forgery with: :null_session
end

You can also do this on a per controller basis in your app, if only some controllers will serve the API.

Configure Development Environment

Edit config/environments/development.rb

Eager loading of classes is recommended. The code will work without it, but I think it's the right way to go. See http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2012/08/eager-loading-for-greater-good/

  # Eager load code on boot so JSONAPI-Resources resources are loaded and processed globally
  config.eager_load = true

config.consider_all_requests_local       = false

This will prevent the server from returning the HTML formatted error messages when an exception happens. Not strictly necessary, but it makes for nicer output when debugging using curl or a client library.

CORS - optional

You might run into CORS issues when accessing from the browser. You can use the rack-cors gem to allow sharing across origins. See https://github.com/cyu/rack-cors for more details.

Add the gem to your Gemfile

gem 'rack-cors'

Add the CORS middleware to your config/application.rb:

# Example only, please understand CORS before blindly adding this configuration
# This is not enabled in the peeps source code.
module Peeps
  class Application < Rails::Application
    # ...

    # Rails 5

    config.middleware.insert_before 0, Rack::Cors do
      allow do
        origins '*'
        resource '*', headers: :any, methods: [:get, :post, :options]
      end
    end

    # Rails 3/4

    config.middleware.insert_before 0, "Rack::Cors" do
      allow do
        origins '*'
        resource '*', headers: :any, methods: [:get, :post, :options]
      end
    end

end
end

Now let's put some meat into the app

Create Models for our data

Use the standard rails generator to create a model for Contacts and one for related PhoneNumbers

rails g model Contact name_first:string name_last:string email:string twitter:string

Edit the model

class Contact < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :phone_numbers

  ### Validations
  validates :name_first, presence: true
  validates :name_last, presence: true

end

Create the PhoneNumber model

rails g model PhoneNumber contact_id:integer name:string phone_number:string

Edit it

class PhoneNumber < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :contact
end

Migrate the DB

rake db:migrate

Create Controllers

Use the rails generator to create empty controllers. These will be inherit methods from the ResourceController so they will know how to respond to the standard REST methods.

rails g controller Contacts --skip-assets
rails g controller PhoneNumbers --skip-assets

Create our resources directory

We need a directory to hold our resources. Let's put in under our app directory

mkdir app/resources

Create the resources

Create a new file for each resource. This must be named in a standard way so it can be found. This should be the single underscored name of the model with _resource.rb appended. For Contacts this will be contact_resource.rb.

Make the two resource files

contact_resource.rb

class ContactResource < JSONAPI::Resource
  attributes :name_first, :name_last, :email, :twitter
  has_many :phone_numbers
end

and phone_number_resource.rb

class PhoneNumberResource < JSONAPI::Resource
  attributes :name, :phone_number
  has_one :contact

  filter :contact
end

Setup routes

Add the routes for the new resources

jsonapi_resources :contacts
jsonapi_resources :phone_numbers

Test it out

Launch the app

rails server

Create a new contact

curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.api+json" -H 'Content-Type:application/vnd.api+json' -X POST -d '{"data": {"type":"contacts", "attributes":{"name-first":"John", "name-last":"Doe", "email":"john.doe@boring.test"}}}' http://localhost:3000/contacts

You should get something like this back

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json
Etag: W/"809b88231e24ed1f901240f47278700d"
Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate
X-Request-Id: e4a991a3-555b-42ac-af1e-f103a1007edc
X-Runtime: 0.151446
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.2.2/2015-04-13)
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 18:21:21 GMT
Content-Length: 363
Connection: Keep-Alive

{"data":{"id":"1","type":"contacts","links":{"self":"http://localhost:3000/contacts/1"},"attributes":{"name-first":"John","name-last":"Doe","email":"john.doe@boring.test","twitter":null},"relationships":{"phone-numbers":{"links":{"self":"http://localhost:3000/contacts/1/relationships/phone-numbers","related":"http://localhost:3000/contacts/1/phone-numbers"}}}}}

You can now create a phone number for this contact

curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.api+json" -H 'Content-Type:application/vnd.api+json' -X POST -d '{ "data": { "type": "phone-numbers", "relationships": { "contact": { "data": { "type": "contacts", "id": "1" } } }, "attributes": { "name": "home", "phone-number": "(603) 555-1212" } } }' http://localhost:3000/phone-numbers

And you should get back something like this:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json
Etag: W/"b8d0ce0fd869a38dfb812c5ac1afa94e"
Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate
X-Request-Id: 63920c97-247a-43e7-9fe3-87ede9e84bb5
X-Runtime: 0.018539
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.2.2/2015-04-13)
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 18:22:13 GMT
Content-Length: 363
Connection: Keep-Alive

{"data":{"id":"1","type":"phone-numbers","links":{"self":"http://localhost:3000/phone-numbers/1"},"attributes":{"name":"home","phone-number":"(603) 555-1212"},"relationships":{"contact":{"links":{"self":"http://localhost:3000/phone-numbers/1/relationships/contact","related":"http://localhost:3000/phone-numbers/1/contact"},"data":{"type":"contacts","id":"1"}}}}}

You can now query all one of your contacts

curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.api+json" "http://localhost:3000/contacts"

And you get this back:

TTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json
Etag: W/"512c3c875409b401c0446945bb40916f"
Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate
X-Request-Id: b324bff8-8196-4c43-80fd-b2fd1f41c565
X-Runtime: 0.004106
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.2.2/2015-04-13)
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 18:23:19 GMT
Content-Length: 365
Connection: Keep-Alive

{"data":[{"id":"1","type":"contacts","links":{"self":"http://localhost:3000/contacts/1"},"attributes":{"name-first":"John","name-last":"Doe","email":"john.doe@boring.test","twitter":null},"relationships":{"phone-numbers":{"links":{"self":"http://localhost:3000/contacts/1/relationships/phone-numbers","related":"http://localhost:3000/contacts/1/phone-numbers"}}}}]}

Note that the phone_number id is included in the links, but not the details of the phone number. You can get these by setting an include:

curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.api+json" "http://localhost:3000/contacts?include=phone-numbers"

and some fields:

curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.api+json" "http://localhost:3000/contacts?include=phone-numbers&fields%5Bcontacts%5D=name-first,name-last&fields%5Bphone-numbers%5D=name"

Test a validation Error

curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.api+json" -H 'Content-Type:application/vnd.api+json' -X POST -d '{ "data": { "type": "contacts", "attributes": { "name-first": "John Doe", "email": "john.doe@boring.test" } } }' http://localhost:3000/contacts

Handling More Data

The earlier responses seem pretty snappy, but they are not really returning a lot of data. In a real world system there will be a lot more data. Lets mock some with the faker gem.

Add fake data for testing

Add the faker gem to your Gemfile

gem 'faker', group: [:development, :test]

And add some seed data using the seeds file

# This file should contain all the record creation needed to seed the database with its default values.
# The data can then be loaded with the rails db:seed command (or created alongside the database with db:setup).
#
# Examples:
#
#   movies = Movie.create([{ name: 'Star Wars' }, { name: 'Lord of the Rings' }])
#   Character.create(name: 'Luke', movie: movies.first)

contacts = []
20000.times do
  contacts << Contact.create({
                               name_first: Faker::Name.first_name,
                               name_last: Faker::Name.last_name,