Question

I’ve been following this tutorial http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/development/rest.html for restful web services integration with cakephp over and over and it seems that it´s not working for my purposes because there`s some issues with the xml automatic constructions (wrong documentation maybe?)

Anyway my question is more a petition. Do you know by any case a good downloadable example related to create Rest web services on cakePHP 2.0 framework? you know, where you can see the code, the structure and so on. A simple but a good example.

Answer 1

Ok I see what happens. there´s an issue between cakePHP query result array construction and the form that the xml helper expect to see it for a proper creation of the xml file. For example you construct an array for get all your posts ($posts = $this->Post->find('all');)

This is what you get:

   $posts = array(
    'post' => array(
        array(
            'id' => '1',
            'tittle' => 'The title'
        ),
        array(
            'id' => '2',
            'tittle' => 'A title once again'
       )
    )
);

this what an instruction like $xml = Xml::build($xmlPosts); on cakePHP expect on, for example, in a index.ctp file under your xml folder, inside View/Posts:

$posts = array(
  'posts' => array(
    'post' => array(
        array(
            'id' => '1',
            'tittle' => 'The title'
        ),
        array(
            'id' => '2',
            'tittle' => 'A title once again'
        )
    )
  )
);
$xml = Xml::build($post);

The problem yields in that with XML parser needs a root element in the array.

the documentation on cakePHP dosen´t tell you that. So be careful on follow the example about REST services if you are a beginner on the cookbook.

You can fix the issue doing so array rearrangement in the index.ctp xml constructor. Something like this:

<?php
$xmlPosts = array('posts' => array('post' => $posts));
$xml = Xml::build($xmlPosts);
echo $xml->saveXML();
?>

I know is not the optimal solution. But I’m open to more thoughtful answers.