Problem/Motivation

A json or hal+json request leads to 'deep' nested data structures.

$ curl --user admin:admin --header 'Accept: application/json' --header 'Accept-Language: nl' --header 'Content-Language: nl' --request GET http://drupal.d8/node/1 | json_pp

{
...
   "changed" : [
      {
         "value" : "1411395751"
      }
   ],
...
   "title" : [
      {
         "value" : "Importunus Letalis Ludus Luptatum Ut"
      }
   ],
...

Why not remove the list-ness for single value items into key-value pairs? Or at least remove the array-ness

{
...
   "changed" : "1411395751"
...
   "title" : "Importunus Letalis Ludus Luptatum Ut"
...

Why not allow to configure what to output for compound fields like body, field_image like: summary, format, value, alt, title, width, height?

Why not add the image uri for image_fields?

This boils down to field formatters combined with #2339795: Add "REST modes", just like we have "view modes" and "form modes" AND depth argument to reduce # of requests

Proposed resolution

tbd

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

API changes

Comments

briward’s picture

briward commented

I would agree that it's important to not expose system-information within an API. However, while this is waiting to be decided you could always create a data transformer within a custom RestResource class to handle this.

dawehner’s picture

dawehner
Primary language German
commented

Well you know its tricky, given that all those things could be multivalues as well. Making it clear that all fields are actually list of data is not the worst idea IMHO

wim leers’s picture

wim leers
Location Ghent 🇧🇪🇪🇺
commented
Title: Make json data non-drupalish » Make JSON data non-Drupalish
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)
Issue tags: +API-First Initiative, +DrupalWTF

What #2 says. There's sadly no way around it. We should provide basic JS libraries that makes it simpler to deal with this though.

dawehner’s picture

dawehner
Primary language German
commented

If you really worry about you can still provide some custom code to just return exactly what you want, but in order to provide any kind of generic interaction with Drupal, the current behaviour is needed.

clemens.tolboom’s picture

clemens.tolboom
Primary language Dutch
Location Groningen, 🇳🇱/🇪🇺
commented

Thanks for closure: as read in #2339795: Add "REST modes", just like we have "view modes" and "form modes" AND depth argument to reduce # of requests we built a data sync tools which has some value. Headless developers should write transformers to/from Drupal json to make this easier like I did in trying to cope with hal vs json through test project https://github.com/clemens-tolboom/drupal-8-rest-angularjs