How to do a PHP POST to external webapi in Grav CMS?

Question

I'm really new to Grav CMS and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do a post request to an external webapi to pass form data.

Normally I will have PHP Code that gets executed after a form submission and will do a post request to the webapi, reading a question here https://getgrav.org/forum#!/getgrav/general:adding-php-code-in-grav says that should separate all the custom php logic using plugins.

Should I use plugins to do my form post request to the external webapi?

I just want to make sure I'm going in the right direction with plugins.

Answer 1

You can build a plugin for that. Here is a quick sample code, you post your form to the sample page, which is yoursite.com/my-form-route in this example

<?php
namespace Grav\Plugin;

use \Grav\Common\Plugin;

class MyAPIPlugin extends Plugin
{
    public static function getSubscribedEvents()
    {
        return [
            'onPluginsInitialized' => ['onPluginsInitialized', 0]
        ];
    }

    public function onPluginsInitialized()
    {
        if ($this->isAdmin())
            return;

        $this->enable([
            'onPageInitialized' => ['onPageInitialized', 0],
        ]);
    }

    public function onPageInitialized()
    {
        // This route should be set in the plugin's setting instead of hard-code here.
        $myFormRoute = 'my-form-route';

        $page = $this->grav['page'];
        $currentPageRoute = $page->route();

        // This is not the page containing my form. Skip and render the page as normal.
        if ($myFormRoute != $currentPageRoute)
            return;

        // This is page containing my form, check if there is submitted data in $_POST and send it to external API.
        if (!isset($_POST['my_form']))
            return;

        // Send $_POST['my_form'] to external API here.
    }
}