Using the REST webservice

This tutorial shows you how to use the PrestaShop web service with PHP library by creating a "CRUD" application.

Prerequisites

• PrestaShop 1.4 installed on a server with mod_rewrite enabled (Apache only).

• A local XAMPP server with PHP5.

About CRUD & REST

CRUD is an acronym that stands for "Create, Read, Update, Delete". These are the four basic operations for managing data in an application.

The PrestaShop web service uses the REST architecture in order to be available on as many platforms as possible, since HTTP and XML protocols are present on countless platforms.

REST defines an architecture that represents a set of good methods to practice on the web. It defines several rules, including one that we will describe that is similar to CRUD.

In HTTP, there are 4 main methods that can perform processing on data that are defined in the REST architecture. This correspondence can also be done with CRUD and SQL:

HTTP/ REST	CRUD	SQL
POST	Create	INSERT
GET	Retrieve	SELECT
PUT	Update	UPDATE
DELETE	Delete	DELETE

About this tutorial

Together, we will look at how to create a small application to perform these four operations on our customers.

Chapters 1, 2 and 3 are mandatory.

In the next chapters, you'll learn how to interact with the web service with each of the CRUD operations, in order to give you the tools to make a full CRUD application.

If you only want to retrieve data, for example when developing a web application to notify you of orders, you might only be interested in Chapter 4.

If you prefer to develop a more complete application, chapters 4 to 7 will interest you.

Chapter 1 - Introduction: Creating Access to Back Office Chapter 2 - Discovery: Testing access to the web service with the browser Chapter 3 - First steps: Access the Web service and list client Chapter 3.1 - Access the web service through the bookstore Chapter 3.2 - Handling errors Chapter 3.3 - List clients Chapter 4 - Retrieve Data: Retrieving a client Chapter 5 - Modification: Update client Chapter 6 - Creation: Remote Online Form Chapter 7 - Removal: Remove customer accounts from the database Chapter 8 - Advanced Use

Implementations

• Manage your PrestaShop website through Open ERP: Prestashop OpenERP Connector by Akretion & CampToCamp (GNU Affero GPLv3)
• A Scala library to access the PrestaShop web service: prestasac by Alex Dean (GNU Affero GPLv3)
• A Python library to access the PrestaShop web service: prestapyt by Guewen Baconnier (GNU Affero GPLv3)

Files

Web service library

The latest version of the PSWebServiceLibrary.php file can be found on our code repository: https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop-webservice-lib/blob/master/PSWebServiceLibrary.php To download the file:

1. Click here to view the raw file: https://raw.github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop-webservice-lib/master/PSWebServiceLibrary.php
2. Copy/paste the file into an empty text local file, using for instance Notepad.

3. Save the file as PSWebServiceLibrary.php

You can also directly download a zip archive of all the files in this repository, including the example files, by clicking here: https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop-webservice-lib/archive/master.zip

Examples files

All the example files can be found on our code repository: https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop-webservice-lib/tree/master/examples