python-rest-model

A standard way to consume a RESTful service, inspired by Django models

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Project description

Introduction

Python Rest Client exists to solve the common problem of consuming RESTful services.

The Problem

In an OOP language as Python, developers tend to think of their data as objects and associated attributes and behaviors. When it comes to consuming a RESTful service, you typically wrap the actual communication using functions, methods or classes and spend some time to design your handler(s). That typically results in repetitive and not-so-readable code. Also different developers usually have different approaches on how to handle this issue. If you want to make sure you are passing the right data types that would be a totally different story !

The Solution

Python Rest Client solves these issues by treating the RESTful endpoints as they should be … endpoints to resources ! It lets you define your own resources like you do in Django models, by extending a class and defining some attributes, and that’s it ! You can have objects that handles data type validation on attributes, define the endpoints once at a single location, and the operations can be chained.

Quick Start

After you install Python Rest Client you can use it as following.

from rest_client import models         # import models

class Student(models.RestModel):       # extend models.RestModel
  name = models.StringField()
  age = models.PositiveIntegerField()
  gpa = models.PositiveFloatField()

  class Meta:             # An inner meta class is required to define endpoints
    post = "http://shangri-la/students/"  # each entry should map to an HTTP action
    put = "http://shangri-la/students/{id}"
    delete = "http://shangri-la/students/{id}"
    get = "http://shangri-la/classes/{class_id}/{student_id}"

After you define your resource and the endpoints you need, you can use them as following …

student = Student()
student.post(name='Bob', age=27, gpa=3.6)

If you try to assign an attribute a wrong data type a TypeError will be raised

>>> student.post(name=7, age=27, gpa=3.6)

Traceback (most recent call last):
...
TypeError: expected <class 'str'>

You can format the endpoints at each request using the format method, which makes it very easy to follow the DRY principle and at the same time dealing with multiple resources of the same type based on a different id. For example if you need to get students with ids in range 13 to 20 at a class with id 15 you can do the following …

for i in range(13, 21):
  student = student.format(class_id=15, student_id=i).get()
  response = student.response

each returned object from get, post, …etc methods is a requests response object: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/

The attributes are sent as query string unless you set the json_body argument at format method to be True, they will be sent as JSON body with the proper header.

student.format(json_body=True, id=18).put(name='Alice', age=27, gpa=3.6)

the post, put, … etc methods used in the examples are dynamically generated based on what you define in the inner Meta class, if you try to call an undefined action an AttributeError will be raised. You can find additional examples in the tests directory.