Building SaaS Website #12: REST API Development

In our previous blog post, we explored schema validation and created our Plan schema with CRUD operations. Today, we'll build upon that by implementing a REST API for our admin panel to manage these plans effectively.

What We'll Build

We'll create an API that allows administrators to:

View all subscription plans
Get details of a specific plan
Create new plans
Update existing plans
Delete plans

Let's start by setting up our API routes:

// controllers/api.js
exports.install = function() {
    // Single API endpoint for all plan operations
    ROUTE('+API ?  plans               --> Plan/list');
    ROUTE('+API ?  plans_read/{id}     --> Plan/read');
    ROUTE('+API ?  plans_insert        --> Plan/insert');
    ROUTE('+API ?  plans_update/{id}   --> Plan/update');
    ROUTE('+API ?  plans_remove/{id}   --> Plan/remove');
};

How Total.js API Routing Works

In Total.js, API routing is designed to be efficient and simple. Here's what's happening:

We define one main endpoint (usually /api/)
- We use ? which gets replaced by CONF.$api (defaults to /api/)
- All our API operations go through this single endpoint

When making requests:
- All requests use POST method
- The body specifies which schema and operation to use
- The framework handles routing to the correct schema action

For example, to update a plan, instead of directly calling /api/plans_update/123, the request would look like:

// POST https://localhost:5000/api/
{
    "schema": "plans_update/123",
    "data": {
        "name": "Premium Plan",
        "price": 5000
    }
}

This approach means:

One endpoint handles all our API operations
Simpler routing management
Better performance
Easy to add new operations

These routes directly connect to those schema actions we created. The +API (notice the +) prefix ensures these routes are protected and only accessible to authenticated administrators.

Testing It Out

Our API will be used by the admin panel we'll build in the next blog post. For now, you can test it using your preferred API testing tool.

Benefits for our Admin Panel

This routing system gives us several advantages:

Better performance (all routes use one endpoint)
Built-in support for data encryption
Automatic error handling
Easy to maintain and extend
Works seamlessly with our schemas

In real use, when our admin panel makes a request, it's all handled automatically by Total.js. We don't need to worry about the underlying mechanism - it just works!

What's Next?

In our next post, we'll create a beautiful admin interface that uses this API to manage subscription plans. We'll build a dashboard where administrators can easily view and modify plans without dealing with the API directly.

Stay tuned for more SaaS development insights! 🚀