Book Image

Django RESTful Web Services

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Django RESTful Web Services

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Django is a Python web framework that makes the web development process very easy. It reduces the amount of trivial code, which simplifies the creation of web applications and results in faster development. It is very powerful and a great choice for creating RESTful web services. If you are a Python developer and want to efficiently create RESTful web services with Django for your apps, then this is the right book for you. The book starts off by showing you how to install and configure the environment, required software, and tools to create RESTful web services with Django and the Django REST framework. We then move on to working with advanced serialization and migrations to interact with SQLite and non-SQL data sources. We will use the features included in the Django REST framework to improve our simple web service. Further, we will create API views to process diverse HTTP requests on objects, go through relationships and hyperlinked API management, and then discover the necessary steps to include security and permissions related to data models and APIs. We will also apply throttling rules and run tests to check that versioning works as expected. Next we will run automated tests to improve code coverage. By the end of the book, you will be able to build RESTful web services with Django.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
www.PacktPub.com
About the Author
Preface

Understanding accepted and returned content types


So far, our RESTful Web Service has been working with JSON for the response body. The code we wrote in the toys/views.py file in Chapter 3Creating API Views, declares a JSONResponse class and two function-based views. These functions return a JSONResponse when it is necessary to return JSON data and a django.Http.Response.HttpResponse instance when the response is just 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 command to retrieve all the toys with the Accept request header key set to text/html. Remember that the virtual environment we have created in Chapter 3Creating API Views, must be activated in order to run the next http command:

http :8000/toys/ Accept:text/html

The following is the equivalent curl command:

    curl -H "Accept: text/html" -iX GET localhost:8000/toys/

The previous commands...