An API

[The Little Guy]

I want to make an API for my site in the near future, I would like to know a few things...

 

Say I want the user to be able to do: $thing->search('some string'); on their server, and say I want to return an Array that may look like this:

Array
(
     [0] => Array
          (
               [id] => 12923551
               [title] => 'This is the title'
               [info] => 'This is some extra information'
          )
     [1] => Array
          (
               [id] => 32456581
               [title] => 'This is another title'
               [info] => 'This is some extra information'
          )
)

 

Then the user can use that array to do what they want on their server. Is this possible, if so how do you do this?

[Brandon_R]

An api usually outputs the data as XML so you can have id, title etc as XML tags and the value of that inside the tag. You would need to use a mysql query to pull the data and then use DOM etc to insert the data into a tag and output it. Then the client site would use DOM to get the XML and parse it and output it to their visitors.

[The Little Guy]

so... basically I would have to write a method to convert XML output to Arrays?

[trq]

You could just as easily send your data as a serialized array.

[The Little Guy]

So... After reading, what I understand, is that I would do something like this on my server:

 

$arr = array(1,2,3,4,5);
echo serialize($arr);

 

Then on the server that is using the API, they would have this:

 

// $opt contains the string that was returned using cURL
print_r(unserialize($opt));

 

Would this be correct?

[trq]

Something like that, yeah.

[The Little Guy]

Something like that, yeah.

 

Did you have something different in mind?

[trq]

No.

[The Little Guy]

OK Thanks!