Requests

Most content generated by Rhubarb will be in response to a request. The request can be a WebRequest or a CliRequest, or a more specialist form such as BinaryRequest or JsonRequest etc. The actual request type for web requests is determined from the Content-Type header of the request. Each class of request object will carry particular properties relevant to that type of request.

The request object is passed to UrlHandler objects and GenerateResponseInterface objects in the generateResponse methods however at any point you can fetch the request object:

$request = Application::current()->request();
// Or slightly shorter...
$request = Request::current();

To get the payload of a request call the getPayload() function:

$payload = $request->getPayload();

The payload will be of a type specific to the type of request. For example a JsonRequest will return an array or stdClass() object, while the MultiPartFormDataRequest will return an array of key value pairs.

WebRequest

A WebRequest encapsulates the super global PHP arrays and other details such as the url itself. Instead of accessing $_GET, $_POST, $_SERVER, $_FILES, $_ENV, $_COOKIE, $_SESSION directly you should always use the request object. Simply call the matching method:

$query = $request->get("q");
$token = $request->cookie("ltk");

Although seldom required you can also change super global values by passing a second argument

$request->get("q", "hacking q...");

Three public properties are also defined:

$request->host

The host name of the URL

$request->uri

The URI portion of the URL including any query string parameters. Essentially the same as $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]

$request->urlPath

The URI portion of the URL excluding any query string parameters. Essentially the same as $_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"]

To get a full URL using the same http scheme, host and port as the existing request you can call the createUrl method and pass a URI:

$resetPasswordUrl = $request->createUrl("/reset-password/");

Lastly a WebRequest exposes all HTTP headers passed in the request in a similar way to super global values:

$contentType = $request->header("Content-Type");

CliRequest

A CliRequest is returned when Rhubarb is being invoked from a command line invocation (terminal). It has no special properties of its own.