scribe/docs/plugins.md

Extending functionality with plugins

You can use plugins to alter how the Generator fetches data about your routes. For instance, suppose all your routes have a body parameter organizationId, and you don't want to annotate this with @queryParam on each method. You can create a plugin that adds this to all your body parameters. Let's see how to do this.

The stages of route processing

Route processing is performed in four stages:

• metadata (this covers route title, route description, route groupName, route groupDescription, and authentication status (authenticated))
• bodyParameters
• queryParameters
• responses

For each stage, the Generator attempts one or more configured strategies to fetch data. The Generator will call of the strategies configured, progressively combining their results together before to produce the final output of that stage.

Strategies

To create a strategy, create a class that extends \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\Strategy.

The __invoke method of the strategy is where you perform your actions and return data. It receives the following arguments:

• the route (instance of \Illuminate\Routing\Route)
• the controller class handling the route (\ReflectionClass)
• the controller method (\ReflectionMethod $method)
  • the rules specified in the apidoc.php config file for the group this route belongs to, under the apply section (array)
  • the context. This contains all data for the route that has been parsed thus far in the previous stages. This means, by the responses stage, the context will contain the following keys: metadata, bodyParameters and queryParameters.

Here's what your strategy in our example would look like:

<?php

use Illuminate\Routing\Route;
use Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\Strategy;

class AddOrganizationIdBodyParameter extends Strategy
{
    public function __invoke(Route $route, \ReflectionClass $controller, \ReflectionMethod $method, array $routeRules, array $context = [])
    {
        return [
            'organizationId' => [
                'type' => 'integer',
                'description' => 'The ID of the organization', 
                'required' => true, 
                'value' => 2,
            ]
        ];
    }
}

The last thing to do is to register the strategy. Strategies are registered in a strategies key in the apidoc.php file. Here's what the file looks like by default:

...
    'strategies' => [
        'metadata' => [
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\Metadata\GetFromDocBlocks::class,
        ],
        'bodyParameters' => [
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\BodyParameters\GetFromBodyParamTag::class,
        ],
        'queryParameters' => [
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\QueryParameters\GetFromQueryParamTag::class,
        ],
        'responses' => [
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\Responses\UseResponseTag::class,
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\Responses\UseResponseFileTag::class,
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\Responses\UseTransformerTags::class,
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\Responses\ResponseCalls::class,
        ],
    ],
...

You can add, replace or remove strategies from here. In our case, we're adding our bodyParameter strategy:

        'bodyParameters' => [
            \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Strategies\BodyParameters\GetFromBodyParamTag::class,
            AddOrganizationIdBodyParameter::class,
        ],

And we're done. Now, when we run php artisan docs:generate, all our routes will have this bodyParameter added.

We could go further and modify our strategy so it doesn't add this parameter if the route is a GET route or is authenticated:

public function __invoke(Route $route, \ReflectionClass $controller, \ReflectionMethod $method, array $routeRules, array $context = [])
{
    if (in_array('GET', $route->methods()) {
        return null;
    }

    if ($context['metadata']['authenticated']) {
        return null;
    }

    return [
        'organizationId' => [
            'type' => 'integer',
            'description' => 'The ID of the organization', 
            'required' => true, 
            'value' => 2,
        ]
    ];
}

The strategy class also has access to the current apidoc configuration via its config property. For instance, you can retrieve the default group with $this->config->get('default_group').

Yopu are also provided with the instance pproperty stage, which is set to the name of the currently executing stage.

Utilities

You have access to a number of tools when developing strategies. They include:

• The RouteDocBlocker class (in the \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Tools namespace) has a single public static method, getDocBlocksFromRoute(Route $route). It allows you to retrieve the docblocks for a given route. It returns an array of with two keys: method and class containing the docblocks for the method and controller handling the route respectively. Both are instances of \Mpociot\Reflection\DocBlock.

• The ParamsHelper trait (in the \Mpociot\ApiDoc\Tools namespace) can be included in your strategies. It contains a number of useful methods for working with parameters, including type casting and generating dummy values.

API

Each strategy class must implement the __invoke method with the parameters as described above. This method must return the needed data for the intended stage, or null to indicate failure.

• In the metadata stage, strategies should return an array. These are the expected keys (you may omit some, or all):

  'groupName'
  'groupDescription'
  'title'
  'description'
  'authenticated' // boolean
  

• In the bodyParameters and queryParameters stages, you can return an array with arbitrary keys. These keys will serve as the names of your parameters. Array keys can be indicated with Laravel's dot notation. The value of each key should be an array with the following keys:

  'type', // Only used in bodyParameters
  'description', 
  'required', // boolean
  'value', // An example value for the parameter
  

• In the responses stage, your strategy should return an array containing the responses for different status codes. Each key in the array should be a HTTP status code, and each value should be a string containing the response.