Reducing included fields and relationshipsfor Drupal 8 , 9 , 10 , and 11

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Introduction

Optimizing API responses is crucial for ensuring your headless Drupal application performs efficiently. By selectively reducing the number of fields and relationships included in your API responses, you can significantly decrease the payload size, streamline the data transfer, and enhance your application's speed. This lesson will provide insights into minimizing unnecessary data in your APIs.

Understanding Fields and Relationships in JSON:API

When interacting with JSON:API endpoints, each resource can potentially include all the fields and relationships that define it. While comprehensive data access can be helpful, it often results in oversized payloads and higher latency, especially if many fields are irrelevant to the specific use case.

Benefits of Reducing Fields and Relationships

Focusing on essential data elements within API responses offers several benefits:

  • Performance Improvement: Reduces server processing time and network bandwidth usage.
  • Faster Load Times: Delivers faster response times for end-users by transmitting only critical information.
  • Enhanced Scalability: Optimized requests prepare your application for handling increased load efficiently.

Techniques to Reduce Fields and Relationships in APIs

  1. Utilize Sparse Fieldsets:

    Sparse fieldsets allow clients to specify which fields should be included in an API response, eliminating unnecessary data. 

    GET /jsonapi/node/blog?fields[node--blog]=title,summary
# This query will return only the title and summary fields for each blog post node.
  2. Minimize Nested Relationships:

    Avoid including deeply nested relationships by default. Instead, fetch them selectively through separate API calls or sparse fieldsets targeting specific needs. 

    GET /jsonapi/node/blog?include=author&fields[user--user]=name
# Only the author relationship of type user is included with the name field.
  3. Use View Modes:

    Define custom view modes representing specific subsets of fields that cater to different contexts, using display settings to exclude unnecessary data from responses. 

    # Define view modes like "API Minimal" and tailor display settings to include only essential fields.
  4. Configure JSON:API Extras:

    The JSON:API Extras module offers advanced customization of your API endpoints, allowing you to rename fields, hide unnecessary entities, and modify the default exposure of fields. 

    # Installation:
composer require drupal/jsonapi_extras
drush en jsonapi_extras

Example: Optimizing Blog Post API Responses

Suppose you intend to optimize a Blog Post API:

  • Use a request like /jsonapi/node/blog?fields[node--blog]=title,summary,created to fetch only basic information for listing purposes.
  • Separate detailed author data into individual queries to prevent bloating the main response.
  • Configure and leverage view modes specifically for API consumption to manage field visibility efficiently.

This setup significantly accelerates API performance and reduces unnecessary data transmission.

Conclusion

Reducing included fields and relationships is an effective strategy to enhance the performance of your headless Drupal application. By focusing on essential data, you improve response times, ensure scalability, and optimize resource usage, providing an improved experience for both end-users and API consumers.

What's Next?

Our next lesson will dive into batching requests for efficiency, a practice that allows multiple API calls to be combined, increasing performance and reducing latency. Stay tuned as we continue to refine your headless Drupal expertise!