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Content Negotiation

The API system has builtin content negotiation capabilities. It leverages the willdurand/negotiation library.

By default, only the JSON-LD format is enabled. However API Platform Core supports many more formats and can be extended.

The framework natively supports JSON-LD, HAL, raw JSON, XML, YAML and CSV (YAML and CSV support is only available if you use Symfony 3.2+).

Both XML and JSON formats are experimental and there are no assurance that we will not break them.

API Platform Core will automatically detect the best resolving format depending on:

  • enabled formats (link to docs for this / see below)
  • the Accept HTTP header
  • Alternatively to send the proper Accept HTTP header, you can also request a specific format by adding its name as the extension of the URL.
  • Available formats are :
Format Format name MIME types Backward Compatibility guaranteed
JSON-LD jsonld application/ld+json yes
HAL jsonhal application/hal+json yes
JSON json application/json no
XML xml application/xml, text/xml no
HTML (API docs) html text/html no

If the client requested format is not specified (if it's not supported, it will throw an HTTP bad format error), the response format will be the first format defined in the formats configuration key (see below). An example using the builtin XML support is available in Behat specs: https://github.com/api-platform/core/blob/master/features/content_negotiation.feature

The API Platform content negotiation system is extensible. Support for other formats (such as JSONAPI) can be added by creating and registering appropriate encoders and, sometimes, normalizers. Adding support for other standard hypermedia formats upstream is very welcome. Don't hesitate to contribute by adding your encoders and normalizers to API Platform Core.

Enabling Several Formats

The first required step is to configure allowed formats. The following configuration will enable the support of XML (built-in) and of a custom format called myformat and having application/vnd.myformat as MIME type.

# app/config/config.yml

api_platform:
    # ...
    formats:
        jsonld:   ['application/ld+json']
        jsonhal:  ['application/hal+json']
        json:     ['application/json']
        xml:      ['application/xml', 'text/xml']
        html:     ['text/html']
        myformat: ['application/vnd.myformat']

Because the Symfony Serializer component is able to serialize objects in XML, sending an Accept HTTP header with the text/xml string as value is enough to retrieve XML documents from our API. However API Platform knows nothing about the myformat format. We need to register an encoder and optionally a normalizer for this format.

Registering a Custom Serializer

If you are adding support for a format not supported by default by API Platform nor by the Symfony Serializer Component, you need to create custom encoder, decoder and eventually a normalizer and a denormalizer. Refer to the Symfony documentation to learn how to create and register such classes.

API Platform Core will automatically call the serializer with your defined format name (myformat in previous examples) as format parameter during the deserialization process. Then it will return the result to the client with the asked MIME type using its built-in responder.

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