WhiteHouse Responder

This package provides some tools to generate API responses based on the White House Standards in PHP.

Installation

$ composer require emyoutis/whitehouse-responder

Usage

Making Objects

use Emyoutis\WhiteHouseResponder\ErrorsRepository;
use Emyoutis\WhiteHouseResponder\Response;

$errorsRepository = new ErrorsRepository();
$response = new Response($errorsRepository);

Registering Errors

Based on the White House Standards, every error code should points to an error entity. In the WhiteHouse Responder, you can register your errors and their information in an ErrorsRepository class to use them after that.

$errorsRepository->register(
     '40001',
     'Verbose, plain language description of the problem. Provide developers suggestions about how to solve their problems here',
     'This is a message that can be passed along to end-users, if needed.',
     'http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444'
);

Unregistering Errors

It is a common problem that you need to unregister an error after registering it. You can do that with the code below.

$errorsRepository->unregister('40001');

Making Failure Responses

Given that in the White House Standards failure responses should return 400 or 500 responses. So that the we have two usable methods to return errors with these statuses.

• clientError(): This method is ready to generate the response body for the client errors.

  $response->clientError('40001');

• clientError(): This method is ready to generate the response body for the server errors.

  $response->serverError('40001');

After that, we also have another method to be used when you want to specify the status manually.

$response->error('40001', 422);

Replacements

You can place some replaceable phrases in the errors info while registering it, to make their contents dynamic. The replaceable phrases should start with a :.

$errorsRepository->register(
     '40001',
     'The class `:class` is undefined.',
     'An error has been occurred in while finding the :entity.',
     'http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444'
);

return $response->clientError(40001, [
     'class'  => 'Entities/User',
     'entity' => 'user',
])

The returning value will be:

{
  "status": 400,
  "developerMessage": "The class `Entities/User` is undefined.",
  "userMessage": "An error has been occurred in while finding the user.",
  "errorCode": "40001",
  "moreInfo": "http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444"
}

Omitting Error Exception

By default, the errors repository throws exceptions on registering a previously registered error code and requesting for a non-existing error code. But you can disable throwing these exceptions with the code below.

$errorsRepository->disableExceptions();

Making Success Responses

As the White House Standards says, the success responses must contain two parts; results and metadata. These parts can be passed to a success() method to generate a success response.

$results  = [
     [
          'id'    => 1,
          'title' => 'First Item',
     ],
     [
          'id'    => 2,
          'title' => 'Second Item',
     ],
];
$metadata = ['page' => 1];
    
$response = $response->success($results, $metadata);

Key Formatter

You can register a closure to be used to format all the keys which are being generated by the package. For example, if we have a snake_case() function to map strings to the snake-case format, we can have the below code.

$errorsRepository->register(
     '40001',
     'Verbose, plain language description of the problem. Provide developers suggestions about how to solve their problems here',
     'This is a message that can be passed along to end-users, if needed.',
     'http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444'
);

$response->registerFormatter(function ($key) {
    return snake_case($key);
});


return $response->clientError(40001);

The returning result of this code will be:

{
  "status": 400,
  "developer_message": "Verbose, plain language description of the problem. Provide developers suggestions about how to solve their problems here",
  "user_message": "This is a message that can be passed along to end-users, if needed.",
  "error_code": "40001",
  "more_info": "http://www.example.gov/developer/path/to/help/for/444444"
}

💡 Changing the keys may take your responses out of the WhiteHouse Standards.