I'm in a process of migrating Rails project into Django. Rails project was built using restful routes and it never touches the database. Instead, it simply redirects to different methods which all call an external service with the specified action method. Now, I have found a number of frameworks for django that provide restful capability plus a bunch of bells and whistles, but it's an overkill for my current case.
As an alternative, I can ignore action method in urls.py by simply providing a regex to validate urls and then parse the request method in views.py, redirecting to the appropriate method. Is this a way to go or are there any other approaches that I can look at?
Class based views look like the idiomatic way to organize restful view functions by request method.
Django snippets has several simple example implementations.
Related
I'm trying to add new url patterns to the projects urls.py(not an apps urls) on the fly. I couldn't find anything about this on stackoverflow!
Edit:
I'm writing a simple scaffolding app. For a given model, I create forms, views, templates, and urls.py for an app on the fly. The last thing is to add(attach) urls.py of the app to the urls.py of the project automatically.
Django routing does not allow such dynamics, as the routing table is built once in the application startup and never refreshed. Even if it where refreshable then you should communicate the routing table changes across different server processes using database, sockets, Redis pubsub or such mechanism and you would be bending Django framework for something it was not designed to do.
Instead, as the suggestion is, you need one generic regex hook to match the all URLs you want to be "dynamic". Then, inside the view code of this generic URL you can do your own routing based on the full input URL and the available data (E.g. from database). You can even build your own Django URL resolver inside the view if you wish to do so, though this might not be a problem-free approach.
Generally, the better approach to solve the situation like this is called traversal. Django does not natively support traversal, but other Python web frameworks like Pyramid support traversal.
I'm trying to wrap my head around combining a client-side framework like AngularJS with Django. One thing that's really confusing me is the issue of routes and REST.
I've been trying to read a lot about it online, but documentation is limited, especially in terms of Django being combined with Angular (little snippets here or there). I understand that I need to add a REST framework like TastyPie to make a robust REST interface in my app in order for Angular to plug in and grab resources.
However, I'm confused as to how to properly map out my routes in such a way that (1) my server-side app can render my single-page app (SPA) with angular plugged in (2) routes that are supposed to load information/render templates (angular) and retrieve data from the server (django) don't conflict. Like if I have someone going on my website and doing site.com/user/1234 - that route is associated with both the Angular route and the Django route - except one renders a template and the other spits out JSON based on what is retrieved from the DB/server.
In addition, by using the REST api, do I forego a lot of the advantages I have in terms of having ModelForms being synchronized with my Models, etc? Is there any way to maintain this with AngularJS or do I have to look towards an AngularJS substitute.
The question isn't really specific to Django - just a matter of understanding the relationship between back-end and front-end in an SPA.
Routes are not duplicated between the back-end and the front-end. Your Django routes should be set up like:
/api/foo
/api/bar
...
and one single route that delivers a single page full of HTML partials, e.g.
/
The rest of the routes will be defined in Angular, e.g.
/articles/234
/blog/date/slug
...
The Angular controllers that handle those public-facing routes will in turn make $http calls against the API URLs and each will deliver one Angular partial. So there is no duplication, no overlap.
To the second part of your question, you can still use the Django ORM model relationships when constructing your API data, but yes, you'll lose all of that Django goodness when building the front-end.
If you build your API right, all of the data you need in each view will be fully present in the JSON feed that Angular consumes in that view. So you're using the ORM for back-end data construction, but you can't just decide to traverse a model relationship in a template without first preparing the back-end data to provide data for it.
Yes, it's a very different way of thinking of things, and yes it's quite a bit more complex than doing straight Django (or Rails). That's the cost of building a web app rather than a web site.
I'm using Django for my site and trying to incorporate backbone.js. Backbone encourages using Tastypie - but I would rather not. Is there a way to use backbone.js and django without tastypie? Are there any examples out there of how to do this?
I've been were you are. Needed to just make a custom API for backbone to read for the specific instances.
All that really means, is making custom views in your views.py and attaching them to custom urls in urls.py for backbone. Your views will have to return a JSON version of the object or objects
So you end up with friendly looking urls that backbone likes
For example if I had a model of boxes and I want to write a url and a view that sends all the boxes in my database to my frontend delivering them to backbone - I could make a url like this /api/v1/box/all/ really anything you want. In your view you just need to remember to return JSON.
Remember - you need update views to to update from backbone syncings (tastypie PUTS)
something like /api/v1/box/3/update?updatedinfodata
Let me know if you would like me to expand or show some code.
It is possible to bot use TastyPie and just build your own API.
You just need to know Backbone sends to the API and data it expects to receive.
I'm willing to build a restful service using Django, I'm coming form RoR background and facing some problems that could be defined using the following questions:
What package do you recommend to use to have RESTful interfaces?
Is there a way to make nested resources like a post HTTP request to /posts/post_id/comments that adds a new comment ?
Is there a way to add some extra actions out of the CRUD set, like having extra method called notify on Post resource that works on post HTTP request.
Cheers,
1) Check out django piston.
2) Yes, you set it up in your urls list.
3) Yes, this is straightforward to do in your view.
Django Piston:
http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home
I would say that you can do a lot just by implementing your own views that present theirselfs in a RESTful way.
But, there is a project called piston that seems to be exactly what you're looking for: "A mini-framework for Django for creating RESTful APIs".
I have been struggling with choosing a methodology for creating a RESTful API with Django. None of the approaches I've tried seem to be the "silver" bullet. WAPI from http://fi.am is probably the closest to what I would like to accomplish, however I am not sure if it is acceptable in a true RESTful API to have parameters that are resource identifiers be in the querystring instead of in a "clean" URL format. Any suggestions for modifying WAPIs RestBinding.PATTERN to "clean" up the URLs? Another option I've explored is Django-Rest-Interface. However this framework seems to violate one of the most important pieces I need, and that is to include the full resource URL for references to other resources (see http://jacobian.org/writing/rest-worst-practices/ Improper Use of Links). The final option is to use django-multiresponse and basically do it the long way.
Please offer me your best advice, especially people that have dealt with this decision.
For Django, besides tastypie and piston, django-rest-framework is a promising one worth mentioning. I've already migrated one of my projects on it smoothly.
Django REST framework is a lightweight REST framework for Django, that
aims to make it easy to build well-connected, self-describing RESTful
Web APIs.
Quick example:
from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, url
from djangorestframework.resources import ModelResource
from djangorestframework.views import ListOrCreateModelView, InstanceModelView
from myapp.models import MyModel
class MyResource(ModelResource):
model = MyModel
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url(r'^$', ListOrCreateModelView.as_view(resource=MyResource)),
url(r'^(?P<pk>[^/]+)/$', InstanceModelView.as_view(resource=MyResource)),
)
Take the example from the official site, all above codes provide api, self explained documentation (like soap based webservice) and even sandboxing for testing. Very convenient.
Links:
http://django-rest-framework.org/
I believe the recently released django-piston is now the best solution for creating a proper REST interface in Django. django-piston
Note: django-piston seems to no longer be maintained (see comments below)
django-tastypie is a good way to do it, their slogan: "Creating delicious APIs for Django apps since 2010" is pretty comforting ;)
You could take look at django-dynamicresponse, which is a lightweight framework for adding REST API with JSON to your Django applications.
It requires minimal changes to add API support to existing Django apps, and makes it straight-forward to build-in API from the start in new projects.
Basically, it includes middleware support for parsing JSON into request.POST, in addition to serializing the returned context to JSON or rendering a template/redirecting conditionally based on the request type.
This approach differs from other frameworks (such as django-piston) in that you do not need to create separate handlers for API requests. You can also reuse your existing view logic, and keep using form validation etc. like normal views.
I don't know if this project can be useful for you, but sending a link can hardly hurt. Take a look at django-apibuilder , available from http://opensource.washingtontimes.com/projects/django-apibuilder/ . Perhaps it can be useful?
/Jesper
Have a look at this RestifyDjango.
Somewhat related are Django XML-RPC and JSON-RPC.
https://github.com/RueLaLa/savory-pie
Savory Pie is a REST framework that supports django.
I would suggest you look into Django Rest Framework (DRF), play around with this and see if it suits your requirements. The reason I recommend DRF is because it makes making the API views really simple with the use of GenericAPIView classes, Mixin Classes and Mixed in Generic views. You can easily make use of tried and tested design patterns for making your API endpoints as well as keeping your code base neat and concise. You also DRY when writing your code which is always great. Your API views are literally 2-3 lines long.
You can checkout this tutorial http://programmathics.com/programming/python/django-rest-framework-setup/ that begins from setting up your environment to going through the different ways to make your RESTful API using the django rest framework.
Disclaimer: I am the creator of that website.