Using Views to provide custom data sources

The RESTful Web Services module provides Views plugins that allow you to expose data over Views for your RESTful API. This allows you to create a view that has a path and outputs data using a serializer plugin. You can use this to output entities, such as JSON, HAL JSON, or XML, and it can be sent with appropriate headers.

In this recipe, we will create a view that outputs the users of the Drupal site, providing their username, email, and picture if provided.

How to do it…

1. Got o Extend from the administrative toolbar and install the following Web Services modules: Serialization and RESTful Web Services:

2. Go to Structure and then to Views. Click on Add view. Name the view API Users and make it show Users.
3. Check the Provide a REST export checkbox, and type in the api/users path. This is where requests will be made:

4. Click on Save and edit.
5. Change the format of the row plugin from Entity to Fields instead so that we can control the specific output.
6. Ensure that...