The RequestResponse Classes

Request handlers have to return a class that implements the RequestResponse interface located in RequestResponse.php

Current there are few implementations inside Responses/. If none of them suits your needs you're welcome to implement one yourself or open an issue to share your use case if you consider that we need another default implementation.

The RequestResponse interface requires:

• A constructor taking an HTTP response code, 200 OK by default.
• setHeader(string $key, string $value): void providing the functionality of php's header
• serve(): void which is responsible for serving the request to the framework.

A RequestResponse has to provide all of the output processed by the framework and has to do it only when serve() is called.

This is necessarry to provide the programmer with the ability to do mock calls to request handlers without affecting the output to the user.

You should also read:

• The Request Object
• Cookies

Here are descriptions of the provided classes that implement the RequestResponse interface:

InstantResponse

This is not the correct way to implement RequestResponse because there are side effects to the output even if serve() does not get called.

This class implements RequestResponse in terms of it's usage. This is the wrong way to implement it, but also the simplest way to demonstrate what the methods in RequestResponse should do.

It also contains the extra echo() method, placed there to signify that methods that the request handler should use to provide output are not part of the RequestResponse interface.

BufferedResponse

The simplest way to properly implement the RequestResponse interface.

This class simply buffers everything until serve() is called, as this is the desired way a RequestResponse class should work like.

It also contains the getBuffer(): string and clearBuffer(): void methods which allows the output from a request handler to be used inside the application instead of getting served or ignored.

Note: In case you want to use a built-in method that outputs text but you don't want to violate the no-side-effects-until-serve() idea, you can read about PHP's output control functions

ApiResponse

A useful response for creating JSON API-s.

Permits response code modification.

Stores a single variable of any type that can be set with echo() and retrieved with getOutput(). This is useful for reusing your API handlers from your user interface request handlers.

When serve() is called, the stored variable is printed as formatted JSON.

TemplateResponse

This class provides the means to use the Template system described in the Introduction section. Make sure to read that section before using it.

It takes both an HTTP status code and a template file as arguments. As the RequestResponse interface forces the status code to be the first argument and to be constructable without arguments it is recommended to set these variables by name.

new TemplateResponse(file: "index.html");
new TemplateResponse(file: "forbidden.html", code: 403);

Some interesting methods in the TemplateResponse class are:

• setValue(string $name, string $value)
• setValues(array $keyValuePairs)
• getValue(string $name)