Menus API

[jasonHav]

Hey guys,

Is there any consideration to adding an API endpoint to retrieve menus? Combined with the Wagtail v2 API, I can see a great toolset to make React/Angular/Vue driven Wagtail sites.

[ababic]

Hi @jasonHav! As it happens, I've had this in mind for a while :) I've already started laying some of the groundwork for it in this release (e.g. #276, and #279). I got pretty far in a local branch, but the changes were a little too 'sweeping', so I've decided to take a more incremental approach, improving other things as I go.

[ababic]

Hi @jasonHav. I've made quite a bit of progress on a Menus API implementation, and I'm now seeking feedback from the community to help make sure the implementation makes sense / feels natural. Would you be willing to help review the state of the implementation so far?

It's PR #302.

[jasonHav]

Looking good! I'll find a project to have a play with it and get you any feedback I can.
Quickly reading over the code - what was the motivation behind using rest_framework APIView vs. Wagtail's BaseAPIEndpoint?

[ababic]

Great, thanks @jasonHav. If you need any help getting things to work, let me know.

What was the motivation behind using rest_framework APIView vs. Wagtail's BaseAPIEndpoint?

The short answer there is that there's basically very little code in BaseAPIEndpoint that's applicable to what these menu generator views are doing. As far as I can tell, there's really nothing in Wagtail or DRF that seemed like a good fit in terms of functionality. APIView seemed like the simplest possible starting point.

[sowinski]

@ababic
Do you plan to release this feature soon?

I actually want to write a Vue based application and this kind of API would be great. (At least to have a serializer which I can use on my own API endpoint)

[ababic]

@sowinski #302 is pretty far along, but I made some big changes recently, and a lot of tests need reworking. I still need to find a good way to allow custom field values to be rendered for sub-pages. I am going on holiday very soon though, so progress will be stalled for a while.

[sowinski]

Thank you for the update. In the meanwhile I will just write my own serializer :)

[sowinski]

I am trying to iterate over the main menu.
MainMenu.objects.all()[0].menu_items.all()
My problem is, that the returned objects are "MainMenuItem" but I need my custom "CustomMainMenuItem".

I tried to read your code but it is not easy for a beginner :D

EDIT:
Found finally something:
MainMenu.objects.all()[0].get_raw_menu_items()

With that method I get the first level. How can I get the next level of an menu item?

[ababic]

@sowinski. Menu items aren't really designed to be recursively queried in this way, I'm afraid. Menu instances usually prefetch all of the page data they need in advance of rendering, and sub menus request their page data from the original menu instance. This pattern works well for rendering menus from template tags, but it's tricky to make use of it directly like this.

I'm afraid all I can do is recommend that you take a look at the views and serializers from #302, and see if you can work things out from there.