django-json-api 0.2.7

JSON API specification for Django services

django-json-api

django-json-api uses Django's ORM interfaces as inspiration to serialize, request and deserialize entities from databases of other microservices using (and benefiting from) the JSON:API specification.

Installation

To install via pip:

pip install django-json-api

You can also install from the source:

git clone [e-mail]:reveal-co/django-json-api.git
cd django-json-api
git checkout main
pip install -e .

Getting started

Suppose you have a django.db.models.Model class inside microservice A, such as:

from django.db import models

class Company(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=256)
    domain = models.CharField(max_length=256)
    deleted_at = models.DateTimeField(null=True, default=None)

If you wish to consume it from microservice B, first add this inside the aforementioned model's definition:

    class JSONAPIMeta:
        resource_name = 'companies'

and define an instance of a django_json_api.models.JSONAPIModel inside microservice B:

from django_json_api.models import JSONAPIModel
from django_json_api.fields import Attribute

class Company(JSONAPIModel):
    class Meta:
        api_url = MICROSERVICE_A_API_URL
        resource_type = 'companies'

    name = Attribute()
    domain = Attribute()

PS: api_url expects a url with protocol (i.e. starting with http(s)://) and ending with a trailing slash /.

Now, querying companies from microservice B is as easy as:

  Company.objects.all()
  Company.objects.filter(name="Reveal")
  Company.objects.iterator()
  ...

You can also have entities in one microservice relate to entities in another by leveraging both RelatedJSONAPIField and WithJSONAPIQuerySet. Take a look at this model definition from microservice B:

from django.db import models
from django_json_api.django import RelatedJSONAPIField


class User(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=256)
    company = RelatedJSONAPIField(json_api_model=Company)
    deleted_at = models.DateTimeField(null=True, default=None)

Here, Company is the JSONAPIModel defined above. This makes it possible, when querying for a user, to also fetch its related company:

user = User.objects.get(pk=1)
user.company # This will be resolved through an underlying HTTP request

In case of larger querysets, you might want to prefetch the relations as you do with django's prefetch_related. For that, you imbue User's manager using WithJSONApiQuerySet, which will grant the manager a new method: prefetch_jsonapi.

If the remote microservice API supports PATCH request, you can save a record's attributes:

user = User.objects.get(pk=1)
print(user.name)  # Joe
user.name = "Jack"
user.save(update_fields=["name"]) # This will perform a PATCH HTTP request
updated_user = User.from_cache(pk=1)
print(updated_user.name)  # Jack: the updated record with its new attributes is cached

License

MIT