Add support for Doctrine ORM filters on embedded relation

[theofidry]

As seen with @dunglas it would be great to enable filters on embedded relations.

Exemple:

services:
    resource.dummy.search_filter:
        parent: api.doctrine.orm.search_filter
        arguments:
            -
                dummyRelation.slug: exact # enable to use search filter on slug property of the target entity

And then to use the search filter on it: ?dummyRelation.slug=value.

The same way for the date and order filter:

• ?dummyRelation.dummyDate[before]=value
• ?order[dummyRelation.dummyDate]=asc

[Drachenkaetzchen]

This would definitely be very helpful for PartKeepr. Personally I don't need filtering on slugs, and this would result in defining slugs for way too many properties in my project.

[theofidry]

Haha well slugs are just an example after all.

[Drachenkaetzchen]

I just implemented an advanced search filter which could serve as a base for implementations directly in this bundle.

This filter also supports a bunch of operators.

Because I'm using it with ExtJS, the filter accepts JSON in the query string. Example:

http://localhost/~felicitus/PartKeepr/web/app_dev.php/api/units?filter=[{%22property%22:%22name%22,%22operator%22:%22like%22,%22value%22:%22s%%22}]

Here's a more complex example (JSON nicely formatted):

[
   {
      "property":"readCount",
      "operator":">",
      "value":"5"
   },
   {
      "property":"name",
      "operator":"like",
      "value":"%foo%"
   },
   {
      "property":"comments.author.name",
      "operator":"like",
      "value":"%heiner%"
   }
]

Limitations:

• Does not care about IRIs for now
• Does not limit the properties, it supports any property which the entity supports
• Multiple filters are combined using AND. It would probably be nice to support OR as well, but I haven't had that use case so far.
• Requires PHP 5.6 as I'm using a const array
• I might refactor the filter to avoid most of the string operations, as they are ugly and hard to understand

[theofidry]

Sounds very much like LoopBackApiBundle :p Well, there was a time when we discussed about more advanced options with @dunglas, but for both maintenance and performance reasons the SearchFilter will not provide much options by default except for this one.

Still, I love having a search filter with lots of functionalities out of the box which avoids to have to declare too much custom filters. That's the why I did the LoopBackApiBundle filters.

[Drachenkaetzchen]

Oh, I wasn't aware of that bundle :( I might give it a go later.

Do I assume correctly that when I override extractProperties that I could simply parse the JSON in there?

[Drachenkaetzchen]

Whoops, sorry for the noise, embedded relation filtering is unfortunately a showstopper for me right now ;) I might send a pull request in the future, however, PartKeepr needs the work more right now because it's 5th birthday is upcoming and I try to push a new release out until then.

[theofidry]

sure :) Well I haven't started yet on the bundle since I knew it would be handled natively on DunglasApiBundle, be it my contribution or someone else.

[theofidry]

I didn't see your question: no I'm not relying on a JSON syntax, I've detail how the filter works in the doc and you'll see in the code it's pretty straightforward, just using arrays and arrays... I'll try to take a look at you work and what I've used for another project to add the support of embedded relations to DunglasApiBundle this weekend. But yeah since the syntax change and it is not supported yet, I don't think it's a good idea to switch right now if you have short deadlines :)

[dunglas]

@FELICITUS it would be cool to extract your advanced filter in a dedicated library or bundle available on GitHub and reference it to the doc of API Platform like @theofidry did for is own.

Even if I think such advanced filters should not be in the core, I'm sure it will be helpful for a lot of developers available as extension.

[Drachenkaetzchen]

I might do that at a later point. I also plan to externalize the Bundle for ExtJS support, but things are heavily WIP currently, so there might be major changes.