Configuring output fields

Now, we will create a message_fields dictionary that we will use to control the data that we want Flask-RESTful to render in our response, when we return MessageModel instances. Open the previously created api/api.py file and add the following lines. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_chapter_05_01 folder.

message_fields = { 
    'id': fields.Integer, 
    'uri': fields.Url('message_endpoint'), 
    'message': fields.String, 
    'duration': fields.Integer, 
    'creation_date': fields.DateTime, 
    'message_category': fields.String, 
    'printed_times': fields.Integer, 
    'printed_once': fields.Boolean 
} 
 
 
message_manager = MessageManager() 

We declared the message_fields dictionary (dict) with key-value pairs of strings and classes declared in the flask_restful.fields module. The keys are the names of the attributes we want to render from the MessageModel class and the values are the classes that format and return the value for...