Plone REST API endpoints

Volto comunicates with the Plone backend via the so-called "endpoints", which care REST API services exposed by plone.restapi.

You communicate with the REST API service using application/json ACCEPT header. You can also use the ++api++ traversal which does not need the header:

curl -H "Accept: application/json" http://localhost:8080/Plone/mycontent

curl http://localhost:8080/Plone/++api++/mycontent

Unless you found a bug in code, the response from the server is JSON content (using the JSONSchema format).

GET /plone/front-page HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46c2VjcmV0

{
  "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/front-page",
  "@type": "Document",
  "@components": [
    {
      "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/front-page/@actions"
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/front-page/@breadcrumbs"
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/front-page/@navigation"
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/front-page/@types"
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/front-page/@workflow"
    },
    {
      "more components": "..."
    }
  ],
  "UID": "1f699ffa110e45afb1ba502f75f7ec33",
  "title": "Welcome to Plone",
  "more attributes": "..."
}

To access these endpoints, you can use a variety of HTTP verbs (and they are, typically, semantically meaningful, following REST API conventions). For example, the following verbs are used for content manipulation:

• GET /folder to fetch information

• POST /folder/{document-id} to create new content in a folder

• PATCH /folder/{document-id} to update a document

• DELETE /folder/{document-id} to remove a document

plone.restapi comes with many many endpoints, covering a most of the Plone backend functionality. By convention the endpoints are named with a single @ as prefix, to show similarity to the classic Browser Views. Some examples include:

• The unnamed service, which serves as the "content" endpoint, accessed by simply GETing a content URL with the application/json header

• the @navigation endpoints which returns a tree of global navigation items

• the @breadcrumbs which can be used to build a Breadcrumbs for any context

• the @querystring-search that can be used to create a listing, similar to the Collection listing

A complete listing of all the available endpoints is available in the plone.restapi endpoints documentation