Archived Repository This code is no longer maintained. Feel free to fork it, but use it at your own risks.

Multifetch is a Silex provider which adds multifetch capabilities to any Silex project. Based on Facebook's Batch Requests philosophy.

Use Composer to install the package in your project:

composer require marmelab/silex-multifetch "~1.0@dev"

Enable HttpFragmentServiceProvider in your application:

$app->register(new Silex\Provider\HttpFragmentServiceProvider());

$app->register(new Marmelab\Multifetch\MultifetchServiceProvider(), array(
    'multifetch.url' => 'multi', // this is the default value
    'multifetch.methods' => array('POST'), // this is the default value
    'multifetch.parallel' => false, // this is the default value
    'multifetch.headers' => true, // this is the default value
));

Send a request to the route where the provider is listening ('/multi' by default), and pass the requests to be fetched as a JSON object in the request body. For instance, to fetch /products/1 and /users with a single HTTP request, make the following request:

POST /multi HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "product": "/products/1",
    "all_users": "/users"
}

The provider will call both HTTP resources, and return a response with a composite body once all the requests are fetched:

{ 
    "product": {
        "code": 200,
        "headers": [
            { "name": "Content-Type", "value": "application/json" }
        ],
        "body": "{ id: 1, name: \"ipad2\", stock: 34 }"
    },
    "all_users": {
        "code": 200,
        "headers": [
            { "name": "Content-Type", "value": "application/json" }
        ],
        "body": "[{ id: 2459, login: \"paul\" }, { id: 7473, login: \"joe\" }]"
    },
}

Any header present in the multifetch request will be automatically added to all sub-requests.

By default, the '/multi' route listens only for POST requests. However, you can configure the provider to also (or only) accept GET requests. To enable it, just set the multifetch.methods provider configuration to array('GET').

The provider then reads the query parameters to determine the requests to fetch:

GET /multi?product=/product/1&all_users=/users HTTP/1.1

If you want to enable both POST and GET routes, set array('POST', 'GET') value a multifetch.methods value.

To be able to use parallel fetching feature, you must install Parallel.php library. Use Composer to install it:

composer require tiagobutzke/phparallel "~0.1"

A multifetch request can fetche subrequests in parallel, if you add the _parallel parameter:

POST /multi HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "product": "/products/1",
    "all_users": "/users",
    "_parallel": true
}

You can also, if you want, enable parallel fetching for all queries by setting the 'mutltifetch.parallel' provider parameter to true. In that case, if you want to disable parallel fetching for only one query, you can do:

POST /multi HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "product": "/products/1",
    "all_users": "/users",
    "_parallel": false
}

Warning: The parallel option forks a new thread for each sub-request, which may or may not be faster than executing all requests in series, depending on your usage scenario, and the amount of I/O spent in the subrequests.

You may want to remove headers from the response for more efficiency. Set the _headers parameter to false in your query:

POST /multi HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "product": "/products/1",
    "all_users": "/users",
    "_headers": false
}

You can also remove headers from the response for all your queries by setting multifetch.headers to false in the provider configuration.

It's possible that one of your requested operation may throw an error. A similar response will be returned, but with a custom status and body. Successfull requests will be returned, as normal, with a 200 status code.

Here is a response example:

POST /multi HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "product": "/products/1",
    "all_users": "/non_existing_route",
    "single_user": "/users/brian" // will trigger a 500 error
}

{
    "product": {
        "code": 200,
        "headers": [
            { "name": "Content-Type", "value": "application/json" }
        ],
        "body": "{ id: 1, name: \"ipad2\", stock: 34 }"
    },
    "all_users": {
        "code": 404,
        "headers": [],
        "body": "{ error: \"No route found for \\\"GET \\\/non_existing_route\\\"\", type: \"NotFoundHttpException\" }"
    },
    "single_user": {
        "code": 500,
        "headers": [],
        "body": "{ error: \"Oops! Something went wrong.\", type: \"InternalServerError\" }"
    },
}

Run the tests suite with the following commands:

make install
make test

Silex Multifetch is licensed under the MIT License, courtesy of marmelab.