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

Using Strapi roles and permissions

Going back to the main actor use case diagram in Chapter 2, Building Our First API, the main actors in the API are Students, Teachers, and Admins.

Figure 7.12: Use case diagram for main actors and functionalities of the system

Figure 7.12: Use case diagram for main actors and functionalities of the system

As illustrated in the diagram, each user (role) should have certain permissions to interact with the API entities. For example, Teachers can create tutorials and edit their own tutorials but not others, and they cannot create classrooms. Students can view a tutorial but cannot create one, while Admins can perform all CRUD (short for Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations. The following table puts all those permissions into perspective with the tutorial and classroom content-types:

Based on this table, it is clear that we need to define three roles in our API. Let's do that now.

Creating the Student role

The first role we will create is the Student role...