BluePrintREST – SahanaEden

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Version 24 (modified by Fran Boon, 16 years ago) ( diff )
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RESTful API

This page hosts detailed specifications for Blueprint for the RESTful API.

Basic approach for the S3 architecture is to have a Web Services backend & a Javascript client front end. RESTful APIs make this easier.

Web2Py generates URLs in this format:

/application/controller/function/arg1/arg2?var1=x,var2=y

These are generally fairly RESTful anyway, e.g.:

/sahana/gis/add_feature
/sahana/gis/list_features
/sahana/gis/features          # List_add
/sahana/gis/display_feature/1
/sahana/gis/update_feature/1

We can easily change to URLs like these (see BluePrintRESTImplementation):

/sahana/gis/feature           # Acts as 'list'
/sahana/gis/feature/id        # Acts as 'display'
/sahana/gis/feature/create
/sahana/gis/feature/list
/sahana/gis/feature/list_add
/sahana/gis/feature/display/id
/sahana/gis/feature/update/id
/sahana/gis/feature/delete/id

or these:

/sahana/gis/feature/id?method=display
/sahana/gis/feature/id?method=update
/sahana/gis/feature/id?method=delete

NB T3 requires ID to be the last argument, so don't want URLs like: /id/create

There are benefits:

Simplified ability to create .represent widgets:

def shn_list_item(table,action,display='table.name',extra=None):
    if extra:
        items=DIV(TR(TD(A(eval(display),_href=t2.action(action,table.id))),TD(eval(extra))))
    else:
        items=DIV(A(eval(display),_href=t2.action(action,table.id)))
    return DIV(*items)

There are downsides:

Controller functions are more complex:
- Need lots of extra indentation
  - if method==:
  - if t2.logged_in:

We want to extend this to export raw data in other formats, e.g. using the optional vars:

/sahana/gis/feature/display/id?format=[json|xml|csv]

or another arg:

/sahana/gis/feature/display/[json|xml|csv]/id

Web2Py already supports export as JSON, CSV & RTF.

New SQLROW to JSON function: http://groups.google.com/group/web2py/browse_thread/thread/dfb65087574c24f1
For XML Parser discussions, look at BluePrintGISImportExport

It would be best for us to add support to the framework to make it easy for module writers to have this functionality within their controllers.

NB Web2Py currently doesn't support HTTP PUT/DELETE/UPDATE (only GET).
This means a little work in clients but isn't too bad if we maintain consistency: no variations between add/create, view/display, edit/update, etc

Discussion of changes to Web2Py to make it more RESTful: