Exposing additional attributes

In many shops, there are more attributes than the standard ones available in Magento. They then need to be fetched by Front-Commerce for usage in your application. In this documentation guide, you will learn how to add these attributes to any Magento REST endpoint.

An example of what this page will show you is how to expose newly created attributes in the endpoints already used in Front-Commerce. For instance, when retrieving products, Front-Commerce uses the /api/rest/products URL.

Overview

In case where you need to expose new attributes on the existing endpoint you can add this attribute on your api2.xml file.

For that, you need to retrieve resource name (API_UNIQUE_NAME value if you follow the basic structure shown in "Add custom endpoint section") and add your attribute(s) code into the attributes node.

Retrieve the resource name

You can find this data on all api2.xml files.

Update your api2.xml file

In this section you will learn how to expose an attribute which code is my_custom_attribute for the most common Magento resources.

Customer data

It can be achieved with the following XML instructions:

# Your api2.xml file
...
 <resources>
    <customer>
        <attributes>
            <my_custom_attribute />
        </attributes>
    </customer>
</resources>
...

Product data

It can be achieved with the following XML instructions:

# Your api2.xml file
...
 <resources>
    <product>
        <attributes>
            <my_custom_attribute />
        </attributes>
    </product>
</resources>
...

Category data

It can be achieved with the following XML instructions:

# Your api2.xml file
...
 <resources>
    <category>
        <attributes>
            <my_custom_attribute />
        </attributes>
    </category>
</resources>
...

For attributes excluded by another module

Sometimes, you will stumble upon modules that force attribute's exclusion. You can find an example in the app/code/community/Clockworkgeek/Extrarestful/etc/api2.xml file:

...
<category translate="title" module="extrarestful">
    ...
    <exclude_attributes>
        <admin>
            <write>
                <entity_id>1</entity_id>
                <updated_at>1</updated_at>
                <path>1</path>
                <level>1</level>
                <children_count>1</children_count>
                <image_url>1</image_url>
                <url>1</url>
            </write>
        </admin>
        <customer>
            <read>
                <image>1</image>
                <is_active>1</is_active>
            </read>
        </customer>
        <guest>
            <read>
                <image>1</image>
                <is_active>1</is_active>
            </read>
        </guest>
    </exclude_attributes>
    ...
</category>
...

To revert this exclude, you should retrieve the node you want to "disable" in your own api2.xml file and set its value to 0.

For instance, to allow Guests and Customers to access categories images you would do as below:

# Your api2.xml file
...
 <resources>
    <category>
        <exclude_attributes>
            <customer>
                <read>
                    <image>0</image>
                </read>
            </customer>
            <guest>
                <read>
                    <image>0</image>
                </read>
            </guest>
        </exclude_attributes>
    </customers>
</resources>
...

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask us.