Unify Schema/ResourceObject and Request/ResourceObject to improve developer experience

[Luis Pabon]

Just implementing some stuff using this library 👍

One thing I've found rather confusing is having one ResourceObject entity for received resources and a different ResourceObject entity for when we need to create/update. Not only it was unexpected, it's cumbersome to use (class imports, converting one type into another) and very prone to error.

Also, the Request/ResourceObject entity is write-only, and the Schema/ResourceObject entity is read-only. This severely limits what can be done with the entities.

Use cases this separation gets in the way of include:

• Reading a resource from the API, modifying, then sending back for updating
• Unit tests on code that needs to evaluate ResourceObjects
• Referencing ResourceObject on classes that use both - always need to alias imports

These two should really be the same entity, I can't quite see any reason they should be different things entirely since they're virtually the same thing, and indeed on JSONAPI they're the same thing.

[Máté Kocsis]

Hey there,

Thank you for your feedback! You are absolutely right that it's not so good that these classes share the same name. But I have to think about how to best solve the problem because there are some constraints:

• Schema\ResourceObject has links and meta members, while Request\ResourceObject doesn't
• They even don't have the same relationships: relationships in request must only contain a data member, while relationships in responses can have much more information
• I like to follow the Interface Segregation principle. Here is an example: when you process the response, you will never call the setAttributes() or the setRelationships() method, that's why Schema\ResourceObject mustn't have them. This way the API becomes much easier to use: requests are writeable, responses are read-only.

So I'm not convinced at all that these classes should be merged together... But let's think a little bit:

• In order to solve the third problem, maybe they could just be renamed to something different.
• In order to handle your first problem a Factory Method Request\ResourceObject::createFromResponse(Schema\ResourceObject $resourceObject) could be added.
• Another solution might be (which should solve all problems) to merge the two classes and create a RequestResourceObjectInterface and a ResponseResourceObjectInterface. I like it for the first sight, but I don't know if it really works.

I am curious about your opinion about what I've just written.

[Luis Pabon]

No, thank you for your hard work!

Another solution might be (which should solve all problems) to merge the two classes and create a RequestResourceObjectInterface and a ResponseResourceObjectInterface. I like it for the first sight, but I don't know if it really works.

I think that would work nicely. We've currently switched from our in-house JSONAPI client to yours and we used an approach similar to this. It helps streamlining developer experience when you don't need to be constantly converting back and forth.

[Máté Kocsis]

Sorry for being so late! I'll try to come up with a solution, but the Summer is a bit hectic for me :P 😎

[Máté Kocsis]

I started to experiment here with the last solution I proposed: #6

It's not ready yet, because I still have to work on the relationships (they also need two interfaces).