Flask-Filter

Filtering Extension for Flask / SQLAlchemy

Check out our GitHub Pages site for the full documentation.

Flask-Filter is a simple Flask extension for standardizing behavior of REST API resource search endpoints. It is designed to integrate with the Flask-SQLAlchemy extension and Marshmallow, a popular serialization library.

Out-of-the-box, Flask-Filter provides search functionality on top-level object fields via an array of filter objects provided in the JSON body of a POST request. For configuring filtering on derived or nested fields see the "Filtering on Nested Fields" section of the documentation.

Installation

Flask-Filter is available on PyPi. To use this library, we recommend you install it via pip:

(venv)$ pip install flask-filter

Default Filters

Flask-Filter supports searching resources based on an array of filters, JSON objects with the following structure:

{"field": "<field_name>", "op": "<operator>", "value": "<some_value>"}

The built-in filters support the following operators:

Note: Be careful with typing around comparator operators. This version does not provide rigorous type-checking, which could cause problems for a user who submits a search like "find Pets with name greater than 'Fido'"

Many-to-many associations can be searched using the contains operator. For a Dog object with a many-to-many relationship with "favorite toys" defined as Dog.toys = [Toy(), Toy()], you can set the field to "toys.name", the operator to "contains" and the value to "Tennis Ball". This will perform a SQL "any" search on that field / value and return any Dog objects who like tennis balls.

Examples

This section demonstrates simplified use-cases for Flask-Filter. For a complete example app (a Pet Store API), see the /example folder.

Note: examples in this readme define simple /search endpoints that assume a working Flask app has already been initialized, and other required classes have been defined in a pet_store directory. To see a full implementation, go to /examples/pet_store

Example 1: Manually implementing filters in a flask view

Using the FilterSchema class directly, you can deserialize an array of JSON filters into a list of flask_filter.Filter objects and directly apply the filters using Filter.apply to craft a SQLAlchemy query with a complex set of filters.

filter_schema = FilterSchema()
pet_schema = PetSchema()

@app.route('/api/v1/pets/search', methods=['POST'])
def pet_search():
    filters = filter_schema.load(request.json.get("filters"), many=True)
    query = Pet.query
    for f in filters:
        query = f.apply(query, Pet, PetSchema)
    return jsonify(pet_schema.dump(query.all())), 200

Example 2: Automatically filtering using the query_with_filters function

from flask_filter import query_with_filters
pet_schema = PetSchema()

@app.route('/api/v1/pets/search', methods=['POST']
def pet_search():
    pets = query_with_filters(Pet, request.json.get("filters"), PetSchema)
    return jsonify(pet_schema.dump(pets)), 200

Example 3: Initializing and using the Flask extension object

from flask import Flask

from pet_store import Pet, PetSchema  # Model defined as subclass of `db.Model`
from pet_store.extensions import db, filtr  # SQLAlchemy and FlaskFilter objects

app = Flask(__name__)
db.init_app(app)
filtr.init_app(app)


@app.route('/api/v1/pets/search', methods=['POST'])
def pet_search():
    pets = filtr.search(Pet, request.json.get("filters"), PetSchema)
    return jsonify(pet_schema.dump(pets)), 200

or alternatively, if you pre-register the Model and Schema with the FlaskFilter object you do not need to pass the Schema directly to the search method:

filtr.register_model(Dog, DogSchema)  # Register in the app factory

followed by the search execution (without an explicitly-defined schema):

pets = filtr.search(Pet, request.json.get("filters"))

Example 4: Ordering Search Responses

By default, searches return objects ordered on id, ascending. This behavior can be customized with the optional order_by argument.

If you don't have an id parameter for your database objects or you wish to sort by other fields, you should populate the order_by argument to the search function when you call it.

This approach does not allow API consumers to set the order_by argument, but allows the developer to override the default id ordering.

@app.route('/api/v1/pets/search', methods=['POST'])
def pet_search():
    pets = filtr.search(Pet, request.json.get("filters"), PetSchema,
                        order_by=Pet.name)
    return jsonify(pet_schema.dump(pets)), 200

Alternatively, if you wish to allow users to customize the order of the objects in the response, use a string for the order_by argument.

@app.route('/api/v1/pets/search', methods=['POST'])
def pet_search():
    order_by = json.get("orderBy") or "name"
    pets = filtr.search(Pet, request.json.get("filters"), PetSchema,
                        order_by=order_by)
    return jsonify(pet_schema.dump(pets)), 200