silverstripe-framework/docs/en/02_Developer_Guides/11_Integration/01_RestfulService.md

summary: Consume external data through their RESTFul interfaces.

# Restful Service

[api:RestfulService] is used to enable connections to remote web services through PHP's `curl` command. It provides an
interface and utility functions for generating a valid request and parsing the response returned from the web service. 

<div class="alert" markdown="1">
RestfulService currently only supports XML. It has no JSON support at this stage.
</div>

## Examples

### Creating a new RestfulObject

`getWellingtonWeather` queries the Yahoo Weather API for an XML file of the latest weather information. We pass a query 
string parameter `q` with the search query and then convert the resulting XML data to an `ArrayList` object to display 
in the template.

**mysite/code/Page.php**

	:::php
	public function getWellingtonWeather() {
		$fetch = new RestfulService(
			'https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql'
		);
		
		$fetch->setQueryString(array(
			'q' => 'select * from weather.forecast where woeid in (select woeid from geo.places(1) where text="Wellington, NZ")'
		));
		
		// perform the query
		$conn = $fetch->request();

		// parse the XML body
		$msgs = $fetch->getValues($conn->getBody(), "results");

		// generate an object our templates can read
		$output = new ArrayList();

		if($msgs) {
			foreach($msgs as $msg) {
				$output->push(new ArrayData(array(
					'Description' => Convert::xml2raw($msg->channel_item_description)
				)));
			}
		}

		return $output;
	}

## Features

### Basic Authenication

	:::php
	$service = new RestfulService("http://example.harvestapp.com");
	$service->basicAuth('username', 'password');

### Make multiple requests

	:::php
	$service = new RestfulService("http://example.harvestapp.com");

	$peopleXML = $service->request('/people');
	$people = $service->getValues($peopleXML, 'user');

	// ...

	$taskXML = $service->request('/tasks');
	$tasks = $service->getValues($taskXML, 'task');


### Caching

To set the cache interval you can pass it as the 2nd argument to constructor.

	:::php
	$expiry = 60 * 60; // 1 hour;

	$request = new RestfulService("http://example.harvestapp.com", $expiry );


### Getting Values & Attributes

You can traverse through document tree to get the values or attribute of a particular node using XPath. Take for example
the following XML that is returned.

	:::xml
	<entries>
	     <entry id='12'>Sally</entry>
	     <entry id='15'>Ted</entry>
	     <entry id='30'>Matt</entry>
	     <entry id='22'>John</entry>
	</entries>

To extract the id attributes of the entries use:

	:::php
	$this->getAttributes($xml, "entries", "entry");

	// array(array('id' => 12), array('id' => '15'), ..)

To extract the values (the names) of the entries use:

	:::php
	$this->getValues($xml, "entries", "entry");

	// array('Sally', 'Ted', 'Matt', 'John')

### Searching for Values & Attributes

If you don't know the exact position of DOM tree where the node will appear you can use xpath to search for the node. 

<div class="note">
This is the recommended method for retrieving values of name spaced nodes.
</div>

	:::xml
	<media:guide>
	     <media:entry id="2030">video</media:entry>
	</media:guide>

To get the value of entry node with the namespace media, use:

	:::php
	$this->searchValue($response, "//media:guide/media:entry");

	// array('video');


## Best Practices

### Handling Errors

If the web service returned an error (for example, API key not available or inadequate parameters), 
[api:RestfulService] can delegate the error handling to it's descendant class. To handle the errors, subclass 
`RestfulService and define a function called errorCatch.

	:::php
	<?php

	class MyRestfulService extends RestfulService {

		public function errorCatch($response) {
			$err_msg = $response;
			
			if(strpos($err_msg, '<') === false) {
				user_error("YouTube Service Error : $err_msg", E_USER_ERROR);
			}

			return $response;
		}
	}

If you want to bypass error handling, define `checkErrors` in the constructor for `RestfulService`

	:::php
	<?php

	class MyRestfulService extends RestfulService {

		public function __construct($expiry = NULL) {
			parent::__construct('http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/', $expiry);
			
			$this->checkErrors = false;
		}
	}


### Setting cURL options

Restful service uses cURL to make requests. There are various settings that can be defined on the cURL
request (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php) via the curl_setopts function.

There are two ways to define these for `RestfulService`; they can be global settings or per request settings.

It is important to note that your cURL options will be applied LAST and so take preference over any default
values that `RestfulService` sets (such as `CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER`) so changing these options may result
in unexpected behaviour or broken functionality.


#### Global cURL settings

To set global cURL settings you can update the `RestfulService` config via the Config system or YAML.

Here is an example to increase the HTTP Timeout globally. Insert this in your `_config.php` file:

```php
Config::inst()->update('RestfulService', 'default_curl_options', array(
	CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT => 3600,
	CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 10,
));
```


#### Per request settings

When making a request using `RestfulService` one can also pass through an array of cURL options in the last
parameter in `RestfulService::request()`.

For example:

```php

//cURL options
$curlOptions = array(
	CURLOPT_UNRESTRICTED_AUTH => true,
);

$service = new RestfulService('http://example.com/');
$service->request('service.json', 'GET', null, null, $curlOptions);

```


## How to's

* [Embed an RSS Feed](how_tos/embed_rss)

## API Documentation

* [api:RestfulService]