Now, we will create a simple NotificationModel class that we will use to represent notifications. Remember that we won't be persisting the model in any database or file, and therefore, in this case, our class will just provide the required attributes and no mapping information. Create a new models.py file in the service folder. The following lines show the code that creates a NotificationModel class in the service/models.py file. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_2_01_01 folder, in the Flask01/service/models.py file:
class NotificationModel:
def __init__(self, message, ttl, creation_date, notification_category):
# We will automatically generate the new id
self.id = 0
self.message = message
self.ttl = ttl
self.creation_date = creation_date
self.notification_category = notification_category
self.displayed_times = 0
self.displayed_once = False
The NotificationModel class just declares a constructor, that is, the __init__ method. This method receives many arguments and uses them to initialize the attributes with the same names: message, ttl, creation_date, and notification_category. The id attribute is set to 0, displayed_times is set to 0, and displayed_once is set to False. We will automatically increment the identifier for each new notification generated with API calls.
