That looks really interesting. Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

Messing around with Fractal, and I got the basics to work. Just one further question - where's a good spot to initialize the Fractal manager in Laravel? Still pretty new to Laravel.

I have a very similar problem to you - I'm wanting to only return specific columns on many-to-many related objects for an API. After reading this thread I'm now also testing out Fractal, but I'm not having as much luck as you. The documentation doesn't contain a lot of examples so I'm struggling. Do you mind sharing what you've managed to do with Fractal?

In regards to intializing the Fractal manager, I was thinking in the base controller, but I'm also fairly new to Laravel so I say that's probably wrong.

I thought it looked ugly to have both HTML and JSON output in the same controller, so I split it up like this:

• BaseController.php - the main class that extends the Controller class, various default view stuff goes here.
• ContestBaseController - extends BaseController, contains only pure business logic, returns Contest objects.
• ContestHtmlController - pretty much just a wrapper around ContestBaseController that gets Contest objects and returns Views.
• ContestApiController - the same for the JSON API.

I initialize Fractal in BaseController.php for now:

  public function __construct()
  {
    $this->fractal = new Fractal\Manager();
  }

I wrote a ContestTransformer.php and stuck it in app/api, and added the app/api path to start/global.php.

<?php

use League\Fractal;

class ContestTransformer extends Fractal\TransformerAbstract
{

  public function transform(Contest $contest)
  {
    $ary = [
      'id'          => (int) $contest->id,
      'owner_id'    => (int) $contest->owner_id,
      'name'        => $contest->name,
      'is_public'   => (int) $contest->is_public,
      'is_finished' => (int) $contest->is_open,
      'start_date'  => $contest->start_date,
      'end_date'    => $contest->end_date,
      'players'     => $contest->players->toArray(),
      'events'      => [],
    ];

    // Massage events into proper format
    foreach($contest->event as $e) {
      // ...and this is where I quit last night
    }

    return $ary;
  }

}

/* EOF */

And then I can use it like this in ContestApiController.php:

  public function show($contest_id)
  {
    $contest = parent::show($contest_id);
    $resource = new Fractal\Resource\Item($contest, new ContestTransformer);

    return Response::json($this->fractal->createData($resource)->toArray());
  }

Still a bit messy, but I'm working on cleaning it up.

Oh, and I route it like this:

  Route::group(['prefix' => 'api/v0'], function() {
    Route::resource('contest', 'ContestApiController');
  });

Thank you very much for sharing.. I'm back on track now - very much appreciated.

One small update - I didn't like initializing Fractal in the constructor, so I added this method to the base controller:

protected function toJsonArray($resource)
{
  $fractal = new Fractal\Manager();
  return $fractal->createData($resource)->toArray();
}

And I call it in the API controllers:

public function show($contest_id)
{
  $contest = parent::show($contest_id);
  $resource = new Fractal\Resource\Item($contest, new ContestTransformer);
  return Response::json($this->toJsonArray($resource))
    ->setCallback(Input::get('callback'));
}

Instead of doing that, why not use dependency injection? Something like this:

use League\Fractal\Manager;

class ApiController extends Controller
{
    public function __construct(Manager $fractal)
    {
        $this->fractal = $fractal;
        $this->fractal->setRequestedScopes(explode(',', Input::get('include')));
    }
}

Then just make sure that all your API controllers extend ApiController instead of your usual BaseController. Makes things testable.

Can I do that with my current class setup? Still new to Laravel and "proper" PHP coding, but I'm certainly willing to learn new stuff.

Currently I have:

• BaseController
• ContestBaseController extends BaseController (handles all the CRUD verbs for the Contest resource, returns Contest objects)
• ContestHtmlController extends ContestBaseController (calls the parent CRUD methods, then returns HTML views)
• ContestApiController extends ContestBaseController (calls the parent CRUD methods, then returns JSON)

Don't know what your exact setup is, but I'd probably do it like that:

• You got your BaseController and your ApiController (like I mentioned above) at the same level, both extending the basic Controller
• Then you have all the controllers that return views for your application itself (what you call ContestHtmlController). All of them would extend your BaseController
• The last part would be all your API controllers (ContestApiController), which would extend ApiController instead of BaseController

@jsvensson Did you figure out how to access the score data one level up?

For anyone bumping on this thread like me: Take a look at this post.

Especially this part:

public function products()
{
   return $this->belongsToMany('Product')
      ->withPivot('desired_column as desired_column');
      // this way you override aliasing the column to pivot_desired_column
      // thus avoid it being attached to the pivot model
}

You then access desired_column like this:

$model->products()->first()->desired_column //not first()->pivot->desired_column

The same is reflected in the JSON response which would solve the OPs problem.