Page 16 - REST-API

List endpoints are the most complex parts of a REST API: they must support pagination, filtering and sorting consistently without bloating the API surface. The difference between a well designed and a poorly designed list endpoint comes down to three decisions: cursor or offset, which filter parameters are allowed, and how the meta object informs consumers.

Service Contracts, Data Interfaces, SearchCriteriaBuilder and REST API: build custom repositories that guarantee stable APIs across upgrades.

Network failures happen. Timeouts happen. What happens when a client retries a request because it never got a response? For idempotent methods: nothing bad. For POST: possibly a duplicate order, a duplicate record, or a duplicate charge. This article explains how to design REST APIs so that retries are safe.

When sales and marketing see different customer data in the CRM than support sees in Magento, that costs trust and revenue. A well designed CRM synchronization with a clear strategy for batch, realtime and event processing keeps accounts, addresses and segments reliably aligned across both systems.

A direct fetch call that throws JSON at the template is not an API layer, it is a maintenance problem waiting to happen. DTOs, structured error mapping, and retry logic turn a Vue REST API integration into a stable layer you can actually rely on.

Internal tools have different priorities than public APIs: no heavy traffic, but plenty of disparate data sources, shifting requirements and a small team that needs to ship fast. GraphQL for internal tools fits exactly that need, because one schema bundles multiple backends and admin dashboards no longer depend on an endless list of REST endpoints.

Manually extracting JSON data from request arrays and mapping it into PHP objects is error-prone and does not scale. The Symfony Serializer normalizes objects into JSON and denormalizes JSON into type-safe PHP DTOs, with serialization groups, custom normalizers and constructor promotion.

Most REST APIs serve exclusively JSON, even though the HTTP standard offers an elegant mechanism, content negotiation, to offer the same resource in multiple formats depending on what the client requests via the Accept header. For use cases like CSV exports, PDF reports, or legacy XML integrations, it's worth using this mechanism instead of separate endpoints per format.

AWS Lambda does not force a specific programming language. Through the Runtime API, any executable file, including a plain Bash script, can act as a full Lambda runtime. Understanding how the bootstrap file fetches events, calls the actual handler and reports the result back makes it possible to run small glue scripts in Lambda without any interpreter overhead.

A hand maintained changelog falls behind almost inevitably once several developers work on the same API in parallel: one change gets forgotten, another documented too late, and eventually nobody trusts the document anymore. The more reliable path does not start with a human trying to remember every change, it starts with a structural comparison of two OpenAPI versions, from which a changelog draft can be derived mechanically before an editor turns it into readable sentences.