Filters RFC

[soyuka]

We're looking for popular opinions about filters RFC. Here are two examples of well-done filter composition:

• Loopback: https://loopback.io/doc/en/lb3/Where-filter.html
• Postgrest: https://postgrest.org/en/v7.0.0/api.html#horizontal-filtering-rows

Do you know other similar APIs that could inspire us? Please share!

Linked issues:

• API Platform "OR" and "IN" filters  #639
• [RFC] Filter composition core#2400

[soyuka]

About other what motivated the choice?

[walva]

I developed another solution for my current project. I needed to provide a single input to my users to search in several fields. They will be able to search for example in firstname, lastname, username and email using only one query parameter.

The annotation look like this:

#[ApiFilter(MultiSearchFilter::class, properties: [
    'username' => 'partial',
    'firstName' => 'istart',
    'lastName' => 'istart',
    'email' => 'partial',
    ],
    arguments: [
        'separator' => ',',
        'explodeEnabled' => true,
        'overrideExplodeEnabled' => true,
        'explodeParameterName' => 'explode',
        'separatorParameterName' => 'separator',
    ]
)]

Assuming the database contains 2 users:

• A) Jon Doe
• B) Sara Doe

Searching for "Jon" => will return only "Jon Doe"
/users.json?search=Jon
Searching for "Jon doe" => will return both users. (space acting as OR ... like ...)
/users.json?search=Jon%20doe
Searching for "Jon,doe" => will return only "Jon Doe" (comma acting as AND ... like ...)
/users.json?search=Jon%2Cdoe or /users.json?search[]=Jon&search[]=doe

[metaclass-nl]

I found the following (mostly other issues etc. here):

• https://github.com/soyuka/esql
• https://github.com/rollerworks/search
• https://github.com/krakphp/aql
• https://www.odata.org/documentation/odata-version-2-0/uri-conventions/

And then there is the api of the existing ORM Filter classes. They can become composable by implementing an extra interface, see my comment on RFC Filter composition

For a Filter whose composition can be configured one could do something similar to this WhereFilter (FilterLogic), but as input use an array from the configuration specifying nested logic and the results of evaluating Symfony Expressions that have access to $context. Such an expression will throw an exception if a key from $context it accesses is not present. That exception should be caught resulting in the result of only that expression not getting added to the logic. Here is an example:

@ApiFilter(SearchFilter:class, properties={"sku": "iexact", "name": "iword_start", "description": "iword_start"})
@ApiFilter(DateFilter::class, properties={"published": DateFilter::EXCLUDE_NULL})
@ApiFilter(Compose:class, arguments={
	"composition": {
		"or": {
			"filter('sku', context.filters.q)",
			"filter('name', filters.q)",
			"filter('description', context.filters.q)",
			"logic.and(
				filter('published[after]', context.filters.from),
				filter('published[before]', context.filters.through)
			)"
		}
	},
	"apply": "andWhere"
})