#2492 - Groups filtering & retrieve single endpoint

[MatusMak]

Fixes #2492

Changes proposed in this pull request:

• Added dedicated GET /api/groups/{id} endpoint for retrieving single record
• Added basic filtering, sorting and pagination to GET /api/groups endpoint

Reviewers should focus on:

• Overal code style to confirm compliance with established conventions

Confirmed

• Backend changes: tests are green (run composer test).

Required changes:

• Related documentation PR: (Remove if irrelevant)
• Related core extension PRs: (Remove if irrelevant)

[askvortsov1]

Fantastic work, thank you so much for taking up this issue and diving so deep into the codebase! I left a quick change comment in the code.

More generally speaking, I have mixed feelings about the "name" filter, as that feels more like a limited search than a filter. Seeing as it currently requires a precise match, is there a concrete use case? If not, maybe we should leave that one out for now.

[MatusMak]

Yeah, you are right, I'm probably lacking a use case for the exact match filter. I could rewrite it to LIKE match, but that can be a limited searcher as you said.

I wanted to introduce further scoping, so that it can potentially cover use case described in flarum/issue-archive#280. But I guess that it's so rare 99.9% of forums won't need this.

So I guess the question is whether full text match would have any benefits or not. Let me know & I will make the changes :)

[askvortsov1]

To be honest, I think that for now, it might be best to hold off on any name searching functionality until we better understand use cases. The PR is already pretty big, but more importantly, if we set an API now and decide to make changes later, that would be a breaking change. @flarum/core what are y'all thoughts?

I wanted to introduce further scoping, so that it can potentially cover use case described in flarum/issue-archive#280. But I guess that it's so rare 99.9% of forums won't need this.

flarum/issue-archive#280 is complicated because completely paginated groups has big implications across our architecture. This PR is definitely a huge step towards that direction, but I don't think we should aim to tackle it here.

This all being said, thank you again so much for the contribution!

[MatusMak]

if we set an API now and decide to make changes later, that would be a breaking change.

I think that settles it - I have reverted changes related to name filter & marked this PR as ready to review. If there will be a need for name filtering or querying, it can be implemented anytime :).

[askvortsov1]

Excellent, thank you very much!

[SychO9]

Thank you for the PR!

[SychO9]

Code looks good!

[askvortsov1]

Thank you so much for the contribution! I think that code-size-wise, this might be the biggest PR from a first-time contributor we've had 😁