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

Sorting API content

As we have seen so far, Strapi provides us with defaults that allow us as developers to speed up some of the common tasks with minimal effort. A common task when dealing with API content is sorting data according to a specific field.

To sort the data, we can use the sort parameter followed by the field we want to sort on and the direction of the sort. The general format is ?sort=FIELD_NAME:[ASC OR DESC].

To illustrate how the sort parameter works, let's assume we have the following requirement:

As an API user I want to be able to sort the classrooms by the maximum number of students from the largest to the smallest

To satisfy this requirement, we will use the sort API parameter on maxStudents; the API URL will be GET /api/classrooms?sort=maxStudents:desc. Let's test it with Postman; we should see the classrooms sorted by the highest maxStudents number first:

Figure 6.2: An example of sorting classrooms by the number of maximum students

Figure 6.2: An example of sorting classrooms by the number...