Civicrm api : chaining

[valfr35]

Hello everybody,

I'm using civicrm api v3 and i search to use a single "chained" request to create a contact with :

->a new membership : i'm using api.membership.create[...data...] it's OK
->a new contribution : i'm using api.contribution.create[...data...] it's OK

->and a new membershipPayment with api.membershipPayment.create[?]
But i don't know how to link the required params : contribution and membership Id ?

Currently, i create contact, membership, contribution, membershipPayment separately.
I guess it's less efficient...

[Coleman Watts]

Well api chaining really doesn't give any performance gains. Under the hood doing a chained api request is exactly the same as calling the api multiple times.
The only performance gain is when you are doing it via rest/js and then it really does help to have only one ajax request instead of several.

[orubel]

Actually 'api chaining' in the TRUE sense where there is one request and response and the api calls are chained from one to another through their relationship is HIGHLY efficient especially in the fact that you reduce code (both client side and server side), handle checks at the response/request, uri's associated with api object rather than MODEL data through controller, etc etc

It requires proper abstraction of the api layer. Once properly abstracted, the uris can be associated with api objects which then can be related to one another through client side calls by chaining associated api uri's and passing output key identifier to next uri api call in chain
for example person/show=dept_id&dept/show=company_id&company/show=return

this would be called a 'blank chain' as it is GET > GET > GET and has no unsafe method

For more on api chaining see the Grails API Toolkit

[xavier]

That's what Coleman was referring too.

It saves a few lines of code when you call the api locally indeed, but no speed gain if you call the api from php. Where it shines is in client server requests.

X+

[Eileen]

It's also worth nothing that if you include create or delete requests in your api chain & they fail any calls in that chain will be rolled back - this can be useful if you use it correctly

[Jeremy Proffitt]

To actually answer the question, see:
https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/blob/4.4/api/v3/examples/Contact/APIChainedArrayValuesFromSiblingFunction.php

To get membership id, you'd use 'membership_id' => '$value.api.membership.create', and likewise for contribution.