Introduction 

What does it do? 

TCA_API is a TYPO3 extension that automatically generates a REST API from your TYPO3 TCA (Table Configuration Array) definitions. It exposes database tables as Hydra JSON-LD resources through a configuration-driven approach — no custom controllers or Extbase models needed.

By placing a simple PHP configuration file in your extension's Configuration/TcaApi/ directory, you get a fully functional REST API with CRUD operations, filtering, sorting, pagination, validation, and access control.

Motivation 

TYPO3 offers several existing approaches for serving content as structured data. TCA_API was built to fill a gap where other API extensions fall short: exposing multiple resources uniformly, with minimal boilerplate and strong query efficiency. See Motivation for the full comparison.

Features 

  • Full CRUD — List, show, create, update (PUT & PATCH), and delete operations
  • Hydra JSON-LD — Responses follow the Hydra specification (application/ld+json)
  • Configuration-driven — Expose tables by registering a PHP configuration array; no custom controllers needed
  • Serialization groups — Use groups to control which columns appear per operation (list, show, create, update)
  • Filtering — Exact, partial, word-start, range, full-text search, and many-to-many filter strategies via query parameters; relation-path filters (categories.title) reach across one or more hops; configurable defaults and private, non-overrideable filters; extensible via FilterInterface
  • Sorting — Configurable allowed sort columns with defaults
  • Pagination — Offset-based pagination with Hydra PartialCollectionView links
  • Validation — Required, length, range, item-count, and regex validators with structured 422 error responses; auto-derived from TCA and extensible via ValidatorInterface
  • File uploads — multipart/form-data uploads on write endpoints with per-column FAL storage, size limits, and filename masks
  • Access control — Per-operation roles: PUBLIC, FE_USER, FE_GROUP, BE_USER, BE_ADMIN, OWNER (record-level ownership), or custom callable voters
  • Write privilege model — Actor-aware write context with configurable execution strategy, table-level access control, and structured audit logging
  • Virtual properties — Computed fields via callables or column processors, with support for referencing existing columns (including file/image columns at different sizes)
  • Relation handling — Shallow stubs or fully embedded related records (configurable depth); create related records inline on write
  • Userinfo endpoint — Expose the authenticated FE user's own record at a configurable URL
  • Response caching — Tag-based caching for list and show with automatic invalidation through the DataHandler, configurable TTL and per-request bypass
  • Multi-language — URL base segments (/de/api/…) and an optional X-Locale header resolve the TYPO3 SiteLanguage, with translation overlays and language-scoped cache keys
  • OpenAPI + Swagger UI — Auto-generated OpenAPI 3.1.0 spec and interactive Swagger UI served directly from the API prefix, plus a backend module on TYPO3 v14
  • PSR-14 events — Hook into the request lifecycle with Before/AfterOperation and Before/AfterWrite events
  • TYPO3 DataHandler — Write operations use TYPO3's DataHandler for safe, consistent data manipulation
  • Extensible handler pipeline — Register custom operation handlers or override built-in ones from any extension
  • TCA-style overrides — Override or extend any resource config shipped by a third-party package via Configuration/TcaApi/Overrides/

Demo project 

maikschneider/typo3-petstore is a runnable TYPO3 project that exercises a range of TCA_API resource configurations in one place — a working reference for how the configuration options in this manual fit together. It is in early stages and evolves alongside the extension.