Laravel 5.5 API resources for collections (standalone data)

Question

I was wondering if it is possible to define different data for item resource and collection resource.

For collection I only want to send ['id', 'title', 'slug'] but the item resource will contain extra details ['id', 'title', 'slug', 'user', etc.]

I want to achieve something like:

class PageResource extends Resource
{
    /**
     * Transform the resource into an array.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request
     * @return array
     */
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'id' => $this->id,
            'title' => $this->title,
            'slug' => $this->slug,
            'user' => [
                'id' => $this->user->id,
                'name' => $this->user->name,
                'email' => $this->user->email,
            ],
        ];
    }
}

class PageResourceCollection extends ResourceCollection
{
    /**
     * Transform the resource collection into an array.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request
     * @return array
     */
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'id' => $this->id,
            'title' => $this->title,
            'slug' => $this->slug,
        ];
    }
}

PageResourceCollection will not work as expected because it uses PageResource so it needs

return [
            'data' => $this->collection,
       ];

I could duplicate the resource into PageFullResource / PageListResource and PageFullResourceCollection / PageListResourceCollection but I am trying to find a better way to achieve the same result.

Answer 1

The Resource class has a collection method on it. You can return that as the parameter input to your ResourceCollection, and then specify your transformations on the collection.

Controller:

class PageController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return new PageResourceCollection(PageResource::collection(Page::all()));
    }

    public function show(Page $page)
    {
        return new PageResource($page);
    }
}

Resources:

class PageResource extends Resource
{
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'id' => $this->id,
            'title' => $this->title,
            'slug' => $this->slug,
            'user' => [
                'id' => $this->user->id,
                'name' => $this->user->name,
                'email' => $this->user->email,
            ],
        ];
    }
}

class PageResourceCollection extends ResourceCollection
{
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'data' => $this->collection->transform(function($page){
                return [
                    'id' => $page->id,
                    'title' => $page->title,
                    'slug' => $page->slug,
                ];
            }),
        ];
    }
}