Book Image

Designing Web APIs with Strapi

By : Khalid Elshafie, Mozafar Haider
4 (1)
Book Image

Designing Web APIs with Strapi

4 (1)
By: Khalid Elshafie, Mozafar Haider

Overview of this book

Strapi is a Node.js-based, flexible, open-source headless CMS with an integrated admin panel that anyone can use and helps save API development time. APIs built with Strapi can be consumed using REST or GraphQL from any client. With this book, you'll take a hands-on approach to exploring the capabilities of the Strapi platform and creating a custom API from scratch. This book will help JavaScript developers to put their knowledge to work by guiding them through building powerful backend APIs. You'll see how to effortlessly create content structures that can be customized according to your needs, and gain insights into how to write, edit, and manage your content seamlessly with Strapi. As you progress through the chapters, you'll discover a wide range of Strapi features, as well as understand how to add complex features to the API such as user authentication, data sorting, and pagination. You'll not only learn how to find and use existing plugins from the open-source community but also build your own plugins with custom functionality with the Strapi plugin API and add them to the admin panel. Finally, you'll learn how to deploy the API to Heroku and AWS. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build powerful, scalable, and secure APIs using Strapi.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding Strapi
6
Section 2: Diving Deeper into Strapi
11
Section 3: Running Strapi in Production

Understanding relations in Strapi

When building an API, we often need to create relations between different entities of the system. Those relations range from simple and trivial relations to more complex ones. Strapi's Relation field allows us to establish a relation between multiple content-types.

Strapi provides us with six different types of relations to work with, as detailed next.

One-way

This relation reads as has one. If we choose this relation when creating a Tutorial content-type, the relation will read as Tutorial has one Classroom, and what will happen under the hood is that Strapi will create a classroom foreign key (FK) field in the Tutorials table in the database. When creating a Tutorial entity, we can associate it with one Classroom entity, and we will have a classroom object in the API response when we call one of the Tutorial GET API endpoints. The process is illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.7: One-way relation...