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Home > Web Development > Web Services > Building RESTful Python Web Services
Building RESTful Python Web Services
Building RESTful Python Web Services

Building RESTful Python Web Services: Create web services that are lightweight, maintainable, scalable, and secure using the best tools and techniques designed for Python

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Building RESTful Python Web Services

Chapter 2.  Working with Class-Based Views and Hyperlinked APIs in Django

In this chapter, we will expand the capabilities of the RESTful API that we started in the previous chapter. We will change the ORM settings to work with a more powerful PostgreSQL database and we will take advantage of the advanced features included in Django REST Framework that allow us to reduce the boilerplate code for complex APIs, such as class-based views. We will:

  • Use model serializers to eliminate duplicate code
  • Work with wrappers to write API views
  • Use the default parsing and rendering options and move beyond JSON
  • Browse the API
  • Design a RESTful API to interact with a complex PostgreSQL database
  • Understand the tasks performed by each HTTP method
  • Declare relationships with the models
  • Manage serialization and deserialization with relationships and hyperlinks
  • Create class based views and use generic classes
  • Work with endpoints for the API
  • Create and retrieve related resources

Using model serializers to eliminate duplicate code

The GameSerializer class declares many attributes with the same names that we used in the Game model and repeats information, such as the types and the max_length values. The GameSerializer class is a subclass of rest_framework.serializers.Serializer, it declares attributes that we manually mapped to the appropriate types and overrides the create and update methods.

Now, we will create a new version of the GameSerializer class that will inherit from the rest_framework.serializers.ModelSerializer class. The ModelSerializer class automatically populates both set of default fields and a set of default validators. In addition, the class provides default implementations for the create and update methods.

Tip

In case you have any experience with Django Web Framework, you will notice that the Serializer and ModelSerializer classes are similar to the Form and ModelForm classes.

Now, go to the gamesapi/games folder and open the serializers.py file...

Working with wrappers to write API views

Our code in the games/views.py file declared a JSONResponse class and two function-based views. These functions returned JSONResponse when it was necessary to return JSON data and a django.Http.Response.HttpResponse instance when the response was just of an HTTP status code.

No matter the accepted content type specified in the HTTP request header, the view functions always provide the same content in the response body-JSON. Run the following two commands to retrieve all the games with different values for the Accept request header-text/html and application/json :

http :8000/games/ Accept:text/html
http :8000/games/ Accept:application/json

The following are the equivalent curl commands:

curl -H 'Accept: text/html' -iX GET :8000/games/
curl -H 'Accept: application/json' -iX GET :8000/games/

The preceding commands will compose and send the following HTTP request: GET http://localhost:8000/games/. The first command defines the text/html...

Using the default parsing and rendering options and move beyond JSON

The APIView class specifies default settings for each view that we can override by specifying appropriate values in the gamesapi/settings.py file or by overriding the class attributes in subclasses. As previously explained, the usage of the APIView class under the hoods makes the decorator apply these default settings. Thus, whenever we use the decorator, the default parser classes and the default renderer classes will be associated with the function views.

By default, the value for the DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES is the following tuple of classes:

( 
    'rest_framework.parsers.JSONParser', 
    'rest_framework.parsers.FormParser', 
    'rest_framework.parsers.MultiPartParser' 
)

When we use the decorator, the API will be able to handle any of the following content types through the appropriate parsers when accessing the request.data attribute:

  • application/json
  • application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  • multipart...

Browsing the API

With the recent edits, we made it possible for our API to use the default content renderers configured in Django REST Framework, and therefore, our API is capable of rendering the text/html content. We can take advantage of the browsable API, a feature included in Django REST Framework that generates human-friendly HTML output for each resource whenever the request specifies text/html as the value for the Content-type key in the request header.

Whenever we enter a URL for an API resource in a web browser, the browser will require an HTML response, and therefore, Django REST Framework will provide an HTML response built with Bootstrap (http://getbootstrap.com). This response will include a section that displays the resource content in JSON, buttons to perform different requests, and forms to submit data to the resources. As everything in Django REST Framework, we can customize the templates and themes used to generate the browsable API.

Open a web browser and enter http:/...

Using model serializers to eliminate duplicate code

The GameSerializer class declares many attributes with the same names that we used in the Game model and repeats information, such as the types and the max_length values. The GameSerializer class is a subclass of rest_framework.serializers.Serializer, it declares attributes that we manually mapped to the appropriate types and overrides the create and update methods.

Now, we will create a new version of the GameSerializer class that will inherit from the rest_framework.serializers.ModelSerializer class. The ModelSerializer class automatically populates both set of default fields and a set of default validators. In addition, the class provides default implementations for the create and update methods.

Tip

In case you have any experience with Django Web Framework, you will notice that the Serializer and ModelSerializer classes are similar to the Form and ModelForm classes.

Now, go to the gamesapi/games folder and open the serializers.py file....

Working with wrappers to write API views

Our code in the games/views.py file declared a JSONResponse class and two function-based views. These functions returned JSONResponse when it was necessary to return JSON data and a django.Http.Response.HttpResponse instance when the response was just of an HTTP status code.

No matter the accepted content type specified in the HTTP request header, the view functions always provide the same content in the response body-JSON. Run the following two commands to retrieve all the games with different values for the Accept request header-text/html and application/json :

http :8000/games/ Accept:text/html
http :8000/games/ Accept:application/json

The following are the equivalent curl commands:

curl -H 'Accept: text/html' -iX GET :8000/games/
curl -H 'Accept: application/json' -iX GET :8000/games/

The preceding commands will compose and send the following HTTP request: GET http://localhost:8000/games/. The first command defines the text/html value for the Accept...

Using the default parsing and rendering options and move beyond JSON

The APIView class specifies default settings for each view that we can override by specifying appropriate values in the gamesapi/settings.py file or by overriding the class attributes in subclasses. As previously explained, the usage of the APIView class under the hoods makes the decorator apply these default settings. Thus, whenever we use the decorator, the default parser classes and the default renderer classes will be associated with the function views.

By default, the value for the DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES is the following tuple of classes:

( 
    'rest_framework.parsers.JSONParser', 
    'rest_framework.parsers.FormParser', 
    'rest_framework.parsers.MultiPartParser' 
)

When we use the decorator, the API will be able to handle any of the following content types through the appropriate parsers when accessing the request.data attribute:

  • application/json

  • application/x-www-form-urlencoded

  • multipart/form-data

Tip

When...

Browsing the API

With the recent edits, we made it possible for our API to use the default content renderers configured in Django REST Framework, and therefore, our API is capable of rendering the text/html content. We can take advantage of the browsable API, a feature included in Django REST Framework that generates human-friendly HTML output for each resource whenever the request specifies text/html as the value for the Content-type key in the request header.

Whenever we enter a URL for an API resource in a web browser, the browser will require an HTML response, and therefore, Django REST Framework will provide an HTML response built with Bootstrap (http://getbootstrap.com). This response will include a section that displays the resource content in JSON, buttons to perform different requests, and forms to submit data to the resources. As everything in Django REST Framework, we can customize the templates and themes used to generate the browsable API.

Open a web browser and enter http://localhost...

Designing a RESTful API to interact with a complex PostgreSQL database

So far, our RESTful API has performed CRUD operations on a single database table. Now, we want to create a more complex RESTful API with Django REST Framework to interact with a complex database model that has to allow us to register player scores for played games that are grouped into game categories. In our previous RESTful API, we used a string field to specify the game category for a game. In this case, we want to be able to easily retrieve all the games that belong to a specific game category, and therefore, we will have a relationship between a game and a game category.

We should be able to perform CRUD operations on different related resources and resource collections. The following list enumerates the resources and the model names that we will use to represent them in Django REST Framework:

  • Game categories (GameCategory model)

  • Games (Game model)

  • Players (Player model)

  • Player scores (PlayerScore model)

The game category...

Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method

The following table shows the HTTP verbs, the scope, and the semantics for the methods that our new API must support. Each method is composed by an HTTP verb and a scope and all the methods have well-defined meanings for all the resources and collections.

HTTP verb

Scope

Semantics

GET

Collection of game categories

Retrieve all the stored game categories in the collection, sorted by their name in ascending order. Each game category must include a list of URLs for each game resource that belongs to the category.

GET

Game category

Retrieve a single game category. The game category must include a list of URLs for each game resource that belongs to the category.

POST

Collection of game categories

Create a new game category in the collection.

PUT

Game category

Update an existing game category.

PATCH

Game category

Update one or more fields of an existing game category.

DELETE

Game category

Delete an existing...

Declaring relationships with the models

Make sure you quit the Django's development server. Remember that you just need to press Ctrl + C in the terminal or command-prompt window in which it is running. Now, we will create the models that we are going to use to represent and persist the game categories, games, players and scores, and their relationships. Open the games/models.py file and replace its contents with the following code. The lines that declare fields related to other models are highlighted in the code listing. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_chapter_02_03 folder.

from django.db import models 
 
 
class GameCategory(models.Model): 
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200) 
 
    class Meta: 
        ordering = ('name',) 
 
    def __str__(self): 
        return self.name 
 
 
class Game(models.Model): 
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) 
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200) 
    game_category = models.ForeignKey( ...

Managing serialization and deserialization with relationships and hyperlinks

Our new RESTful Web API has to be able to serialize and deserialize the GameCategory, Game, Player, and PlayerScore instances into JSON representations. In this case, we also have to pay special attention to the relationships between the different models when we create the serializer classes to manage serialization to JSON and deserialization from JSON.

In our last version of the previous API, we created a subclass of the rest_framework.serializers.ModelSerializer class to make it easier to generate a serializer and reduce boilerplate code. In this case, we will also declare a class that inherits from ModelSerializer, but the other classes will inherit from the rest_framework.serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer class.

The HyperlinkedModelSerializer is a type of ModelSerializer that uses hyperlinked relationships instead of primary key relationships, and therefore, it represents the realationships to other model...

Creating class-based views and using generic classes

This time, we will write our API views by declaring class-based views, instead of function-based views. We might code classes that inherit from the rest_framework.views.APIView class and declare methods with the same names than the HTTP verbs we want to process: get, post, put, patch, delete, and so on. These methods receive a request argument as happened with the functions that we created for the views. However, this approach would require us to write a lot of code. Instead, we can take advantage of a set of generic views that we can use as our base classes for our class-based views to reduce the required code to the minimum and take advantage of the behavior that has been generalized in Django REST Framework.

We will create subclasses of the two following generic class views declared in rest_framework.generics:

  • ListCreateAPIView: Implements the get method that retrieves a listing of a queryset and the post method that creates a model...

Taking advantage of generic class based views

Go to the gamesapi/games folder and open the views.py file. Replace the code in this file with the following code that declares the required imports and the class based views. We will add more classes to this file later. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_chapter_02_03 folder:

from games.models import GameCategory 
from games.models import Game 
from games.models import Player 
from games.models import PlayerScore 
from games.serializers import GameCategorySerializer 
from games.serializers import GameSerializer 
from games.serializers import PlayerSerializer 
from games.serializers import PlayerScoreSerializer 
from rest_framework import generics 
from rest_framework.response import Response 
from rest_framework.reverse import reverse 
 
 
class GameCategoryList(generics.ListCreateAPIView): 
    queryset = GameCategory.objects.all() 
    serializer_class = GameCategorySerializer 
    name = 'gamecategory-list' 
 
...
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Key benefits

  • Develop RESTful Web Services using the most popular frameworks in Python
  • Configure and fine-tune your APIs using the best tools and techniques available
  • This practical guide will help you to implement complete REST-based APIs from scratch

Description

Python is the language of choice for millions of developers worldwide, due to its gentle learning curve as well as its vast applications in day-to-day programming. It serves the purpose of building great web services in the RESTful architecture. This book will show you the best tools you can use to build your own web services. Learn how to develop RESTful APIs using the popular Python frameworks and all the necessary stacks with Python, Django, Flask, and Tornado, combined with related libraries and tools. We will dive deep into each of these frameworks to build various web services, and will provide use cases and best practices on when to use a particular framework to get the best results. We will show you everything required to successfully develop RESTful APIs with the four frameworks such as request handling, URL mapping, serialization, validation, authentication, authorization, versioning, ORMs, databases, custom code for models and views, and asynchronous callbacks. At the end of each framework, we will add authentication and security to the RESTful APIs and prepare tests for it. By the end of the book, you will have a deep understanding of the stacks needed to build RESTful web services.

Who is this book for?

This book is for web developers who have working knowledge of Python and would like to build amazing web services by taking advantage of the various frameworks of Python. You should have some knowledge of RESTful APIs.

What you will learn

  • * Develop complex RESTful APIs from scratch with Python combined with and without data sources
  • * Choose the most appropriate (micro) framework based on the specific requirements of a RESTful API / web service
  • * Debug, test, and profile RESTful APIs with each of the frameworks
  • * Develop a complex RESTful API that interacts with a PostgreSQL database
  • * Add authentication and permissions to a RESTful API built in each of the frameworks
  • * Map URL patterns to request handlers and check how the API works
  • * Profile an existing API and refactor it to take advantage of asynchronous code
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Publication date : Oct 27, 2016
Length: 418 pages
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Languages :
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Length: 418 pages
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Category :
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Languages :
Python
Concepts :
Web Services
Tools :
Flask

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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
1. Developing RESTful APIs with Django Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
1. Developing RESTful APIs with Django
Designing a RESTful API to interact with a simple SQLite database
Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method
Working with lightweight virtual environments
Setting up the virtual environment with Django REST framework
Creating the models
Managing serialization and deserialization
Writing API views
Making HTTP requests to the API
Test your knowledge
Summary
2. Working with Class-Based Views and Hyperlinked APIs in Django Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Working with Class-Based Views and Hyperlinked APIs in Django
Using model serializers to eliminate duplicate code
Working with wrappers to write API views
Using the default parsing and rendering options and move beyond JSON
Browsing the API
Designing a RESTful API to interact with a complex PostgreSQL database
Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method
Declaring relationships with the models
Managing serialization and deserialization with relationships and hyperlinks
Creating class-based views and using generic classes
Taking advantage of generic class based views
Working with endpoints for the API
Creating and retrieving related resources
Test your knowledge
Summary
3. Improving and Adding Authentication to an API With Django Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Improving and Adding Authentication to an API With Django
Adding unique constraints to the models
Updating a single field for a resource with the PATCH method
Taking advantage of pagination
Customizing pagination classes
Understanding authentication, permissions and throttling
Adding security-related data to the models
Creating a customized permission class for object-level permissions
Persisting the user that makes a request
Configuring permission policies
Setting a default value for a new required field in migrations
Composing requests with the necessary authentication
Browsing the API with authentication credentials
Test your knowledge
Summary
4. Throttling, Filtering, Testing, and Deploying an API with Django Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Throttling, Filtering, Testing, and Deploying an API with Django
Understanding throttling classes
Configuring throttling policies
Testing throttling policies
Understanding filtering, searching, and ordering classes
Configuring filtering, searching, and ordering for views
Testing filtering, searching, and ordering
Filtering, searching, and ordering in the Browsable API
Setting up unit tests
Writing a first round of unit tests
Running unit tests and checking testing coverage
Improving testing coverage
Understanding strategies for deployments and scalability
Test your knowledge
Summary
5. Developing RESTful APIs with Flask Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Developing RESTful APIs with Flask
Designing a RESTful API to interact with a simple data source
Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method
Setting up a virtual environment with Flask and Flask-RESTful
Declaring status codes for the responses
Creating the model
Using a dictionary as a repository
Configuring output fields
Working with resourceful routing on top of Flask pluggable views
Configuring resource routing and endpoints
Making HTTP requests to the Flask API
Test your knowledge
Summary
6. Working with Models, SQLAlchemy, and Hyperlinked APIs in Flask Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Working with Models, SQLAlchemy, and Hyperlinked APIs in Flask
Designing a RESTful API to interact with a PostgreSQL database
Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method
Installing packages to simplify our common tasks
Creating and configuring the database
Creating models with their relationships
Creating schemas to validate, serialize, and deserialize models
Combining blueprints with resourceful routing
Registering the blueprint and running migrations
Creating and retrieving related resources
Test your knowledge
Summary
7. Improving and Adding Authentication to an API with Flask Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Improving and Adding Authentication to an API with Flask
Improving unique constraints in the models
Updating fields for a resource with the PATCH method
Coding a generic pagination class
Adding pagination features
Understanding the steps to add authentication and permissions
Adding a user model
Creating a schemas to validate, serialize, and deserialize users
Adding authentication to resources
Creating resource classes to handle users
Running migrations to generate the user table
Composing requests with the necessary authentication
Test your knowledge
Summary
8. Testing and Deploying an API with Flask Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Testing and Deploying an API with Flask
Setting up unit tests
Writing a first round of unit tests
Running unit tests with nose2 and checking testing coverage
Improving testing coverage
Understanding strategies for deployments and scalability
Test your knowledge
Summary
9. Developing RESTful APIs with Tornado Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Developing RESTful APIs with Tornado
Designing a RESTful API to interact with slow sensors and actuators
Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method
Setting up a virtual environment with Tornado
Declaring status codes for the responses
Creating the classes that represent a drone
Writing request handlers
Mapping URL patterns to request handlers
Making HTTP requests to the Tornado API
Test your knowledge
Summary
10. Working with Asynchronous Code, Testing, and Deploying an API with Tornado Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Working with Asynchronous Code, Testing, and Deploying an API with Tornado
Understanding synchronous and asynchronous execution
Refactoring code to take advantage of asynchronous decorators
Mapping URL patterns to asynchronous request handlers
Making HTTP requests to the Tornado non-blocking API
Setting up unit tests
Writing a first round of unit tests
Running unit tests with nose2 and checking testing coverage
Improving testing coverage
Other Python Web frameworks for building RESTful APIs
Test your knowledge
Summary
11. Exercise Answers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 1, Developing RESTful APIs with Django
Chapter 2, Working with Class-Based Views and Hyperlinked APIs in Django
Chapter 3, Improving and Adding Authentication to an API With Django
Chapter 4, Throttling, Filtering, Testing, and Deploying an API with Django
Chapter 5, Developing RESTful APIs with Flask
Chapter 6, Working with Models, SQLAlchemy, and Hyperlinked APIs in Flask
Chapter 7, Improving and Adding Authentication to an API with Flask
Chapter 8, Testing and Deploying an API with Flask
Chapter 9, Developing RESTful APIs with Tornado
Chapter 10, Working with Asynchronous Code, Testing, and Deploying an API with Tornado

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Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
(5 Ratings)
5 star 60%
4 star 0%
3 star 20%
2 star 20%
1 star 0%
Seacord84 Mar 26, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Very well done book. It had some mistakes here and there, but the material was very well done in my opinion.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Judi Drew Jan 19, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
good book as ordered
Amazon Verified review Amazon
thinkingserious Nov 11, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I am the reviewer for this book and you can view my bio in the front matter. I have gone through every page in detail and executed all of the sample code in a Mac OS X environment.If your goal is to learn how to create a practical RESTful API in either Django, Flask or Tornado (and how to choose between these three frameworks) quickly and effectively, this is your book. You will learn with real-world examples that you can easily modify to fit within your own project.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
K Oct 12, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
It's a shame that I got stuck on a piece of code midway through 2nd chapter b/c I'd liked the book up until that point.The book is clearly written. The examples and explanations are pretty straightforward, it's obvious the author knows APIs and DRF well, and the book is easy to follow. I liked that it was organized into framework sections (first few chapters for DJango, next few chapters for Flask, etc).When I got stuck on pg 68 I did my best to try to solve the issue so I could continue but I couldn't. There was no way the explanation matched what was going on w/ working code. I got on GitHub and posted an issue in the book's code repo but, 13 days later, still haven't gotten a response. I found a workaround but there'd been enough quirks up to this point to make me want to ditch the book in favor of another ("REST APIs with Django" by William S. Vincent - I've just written a 5-star review for it).Maybe I had problems b/c I was using different (more current) software versions than the book:Book: DJango 1.10; DRF 3.3.3Current: DJango 2.1.2; DRF 3.8.2The book also uses (and recommends) the virtual environment included w/ Python. They say that if you prefer to use virtualenv, you can. I use Pipenv.Due to how well the explanations are, I want to think that it's simply due to age (book being now 2 yrs old). That said, I cannot recommend that anyone (now in late 2018) purchase this book for learning to build REST python web services.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Pascal Wamugunda Sep 13, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
More than half the time you'll be frustrated fixing errors....all manner of them! I have been stuck on page 20 for a week now because one line of code won't run: python manage.py makemigrations games {i can't get django to run inside python 3.6 and i cannot get a solution anywhere!}.I suggest the author takes more time to explain installation and setup for the various OS readers could be using. I have shelved this and now I am looking for another book that will help me get data from web APIs for a data collection exercise that is ahead of me.
Amazon Verified review Amazon

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About the author

Profile icon Gastón C. Hillar
Gastón C. Hillar
Gaston C. Hillar is Italian and has been working with computers since he was 8 years old. Gaston has a Bachelor's degree in computer science (graduated with honors) and an MBA. Currently, Gaston is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author who is always looking for new adventures anywhere in the world. He was a senior contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's, and has written more than a hundred articles on software development topics. He has received the prestigious Intel Black Belt Software Developer award eight times. He has written many articles about Java for Oracle Java Magazine. Gaston was also a former Microsoft MVP in technical computing. He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his two sons, Kevin and Brandon.
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Disclaimer:
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