Overview

• WebProxy is PHP library that offers consistent interface for communicating with standard third-party web services, be it API or an ordinary website.
• It offers parsing JSON response from REST API, scrapping and crawling HTML code from website, or calling methods on SOAP services.
• To clarify certain potential misconceptions, please see terminology chapter below.

Included libraries / dependencies

• For HTTP: guzzlehttp/guzzle | http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/stable/
• For HTML crawling: symfony/dom-crawler | https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/dom_crawler.html
• For SOAP: native SoapClient | https://secure.php.net/manual/en/class.soapclient.php

Usage

Examples

• For implemented examples, see demo folder.

General guide

• Create Service class that extends suitable child
  • Options are:
    • RestApi (for REST APIs)
    • Website (for crawling trough Websites)
    • SoapService (for SOAP APIs)
  • Fill in the missing interface methods
    • getUri(): return base URI where service is located.
      • For HttpService it's base URI. E.q. return 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com';
      • For SoapService it's WSDL URI. E.q. return 'https://soapexample.com?wsdl';
• Create Endpoint classes that extends children appropriate to selected Service type
  • Options are:
    • RestResource (for RestApi)
    • Webpage (for crawling trough Website)
    • SoapEndpoint (for SoapService)
  • Fill in the missing interface methods, and optional class variables
    • getServiceClass(): Return class of appropriate service. E.q. return JsonPlaceholderRestApi::class;
    • getRequestName(): Return specification of request that the endpoint performs.
      • For HttpService, it's URI appendend after base Service URI. E.q. return '/posts';
      • For SoapService, it's method name. E.q. return 'getPosts';
    • $supportedMethods: Optional whitelist for HttpServices. E.q. return [Method::POST];
  • Write methods to filter the results
    • For RestResource, utilize parsed data object: return $this->getResponseData()['id'];
    • For Websites, utilize Symfony DOM Crawler: return $this->getCrawler()->filter('.address h3')->text();
    • For SoapEndpoints, utilize parsed data: return $this->getResponseData()['result'];
• Initialize WebProxy object (new WebProxy()) and desired endpoints (new ExampleResource())
• Pass new instance of the custom endpoint to WebProxy trough one of its methods
  • get, post, put, delete as shorthands for HTTP Requests
  • httpRequest for customized HTTP Requests
  • call as shorthand for SOAP request
  • soapRequest for customized SOAP Requests
• for specific purposes, you might want to use httpRequest and soapRequest methods with custom Request object
  • For example, default POST body type is Form-data, or Multipart (if files are sent with it). To send JSON, use Request::create(Method::POST)->withJsonBody(['array','content])
  • pass instance of the Request as second parameter to mentioned methods
• Use returned modified instance of endpoint to return parsed data

Terminology used

• Client: A class that is responsible for performing request on Endpoint located on Service, and fetching the response body
  • HttpClient: Contains single Guzzle instance to perform all requests
  • SoapClient: Passes requests to every independent SoapService's own instance of native SoapClient
• Service: A collection of endpoints located on single domain.
  • HttpService: Service acessible trough HTTP requests
    • RestApi: REST API containing multiple RestResources
    • Website: Site containg multiple Webpages
  • SoapService: Service accessible trough SOAP calls
• Endpoint: One specific function of Service
  • HttpEndpoint: Specific URI on HttpService
    • RestResource: RESTful HttpEndpoint
    • Webpage: HttpEndpoint that returns HTML
  • SoapEndpoint: A method of SoapService