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

Tweaking database queries and responses with life cycle hooks

A model is a representation of a database entity. An entity in a system has a life cycle: it gets created, updated, deleted, and retrieved. While the routes are the external interface to the outside world, the database is the innermost level of our system. Strapi communicates with the database using models that represent it in a database-agnostic way (that is, it can work with different database types) and using the Query Engine API (strapi.db.query).

We briefly mentioned the Query Engine API earlier in this chapter when we came across the Entity Service API and learned that the Entity Service API uses the Query Engine API under the hood to execute database queries. The Query Engine API provides the glue between our models and the actual database entity; it transforms our requests into the final queries to be run against the database and then maps the result back into a model. Sometimes, we want to do something extra...