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Wim Leers: State of JSON:API (January 2019)

As promised 3 months ago, Gabe, Mateu and I shipped support for revisions and file uploads today!

What happened since last month? In a nutshell:

JSON:API 2.1

JSON:API 2.1 follows two weeks after 2.0.

Work-arounds for two very common use cases are no longer necessary: decoupled UIs that are capable of previews and image uploads3.

  • File uploads work similarly to Drupal core’s file uploads in the REST module, with the exception that a simpler developer experience is available when uploading files to an entity that already exists.
  • Revision support is for now limited to retrieving the working copy of an entity using ?resourceVersion=rel:working-copy. This enables the use case we hear about the most: previewing draft Nodes. 4Browsing all revisions is not yet possible due to missing infrastructure in Drupal core. With this, JSON:API leaps ahead of core’s REST API.

Please share your experience with using the JSON:API module!


  1. Note that usage statistics on drupal.org are an underestimation! Any site can opt out from reporting back, and composer-based installs don’t report back by default. ↩︎

  2. Which we can do thanks to the tightly managed API surface of the JSON:API module. ↩︎

  3. These were in fact the two feature requests with the highest number of followers↩︎

  4. Unfortunately only Node and Media entities are supported, since other entity types don’t have standardized revision access control. ↩︎