Django Rest Framework Discovery

Summary

Discovery allows you to create an API from an existing database with minimal effort. This project is based on Shabda Raaj's Bookrest. You can also leverage the capabilties of the Django Rest Framework to apply filtering, pagination and documentation generation. Examples can be found in the examples directory.

Problem Statement

The data is not always accessible in legacy applications. You might be in a situation where you need access to the data for reporting or prototyping new tools. Adding new functionality to legacy software can be cost prohibitive and this solution aims to work-around this issue.

Requirements

For successful schema generation, you need to have a primary key present in the table. Otherwise, it will be silently ignored.

Installation

pip install djangorestframework-discovery

In your settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "rest_framework",
    "rest_framework_discovery",
]

Add a variable to your settings.py named DISCOVERY_ALIAS_NAME. You can use any value, but discovery is recommended. You will use that to define the database you would like to use for viewset generation.

DISCOVERY_ALIAS_NAME = 'discovery'
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
    },
    'discovery': {
        'NAME': 'YOUR_DB_NAME',
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
        'USER': 'YOUR_DB_USER',
        'PASSWORD': 'YOUR_DB_PASSWORD',
        'HOST': 'YOUR_DB_HOST',
        'PORT': 'YOUR_DB_PORT',
    },
}

Add the generated patterns to the rest of your application by modifying the urls.py.

urlpatterns = [
    # ...
    url(r'^api/discovery/', include('rest_framework_discovery.urls')),
]

You will also need to include DEFAULT_SCHEMA_CLASS explicitly in settings.py to get this to work. See additional details..

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
  ...
  'DEFAULT_SCHEMA_CLASS': 'rest_framework.schemas.coreapi.AutoSchema'
}

Testing

You can run through the testing suite by running runtests.py or tox.

Configuration

You can configure the following in settings.py:

• DISCOVERY_ALIAS_NAME: (required) The database alias name to use with discovery.
• DISCOVERY_READ_ONLY: (optional) True or False, whether or not the viewsets should be read-only.
• DISCOVERY_INCLUDE: (optional) A list of tables that you would like to only include.
• DISCOVERY_EXCLUDE: (optional) A list of tables that you would like to ignore.