fnx-wac

Writing RESTful API clients.


License
Other
Install
pip install fnx-wac==0.33

Documentation

wac

To write a friendly client for a RESTful API you typically end up doing the following:

  • Write HTTP client commands for communicating with the server. These commands do things like marshal payloads, convert errors, invoke request hooks, etc.
  • Turn responses deserialized by your client into resource objects (i.e. objectify the response).
  • Build up queries (e.g. filter, sort) to access resources matching some criteria in perhaps a particular order.

In the ideal case the client gives your users something approximating an ORM for your resources. This library is intended to assist you in writing such a client provided the API you are consuming complies with some basic conventions:

  • Uses HTTP properly.
  • Annotates resource representations with type and URI information.

Installation

Simply:

$ pip install finix-wac

or if you prefer:

$ easy_install finix-wac

Requirements

Usage

Lets work through an example. The code for this example is in example.py.

  • First you import wac:
import wac
  • Next define the version of your client:
__version__ = '1.0'
  • Also define the configuration which all Clients will use by default:
default_config = wac.Config(None)
  • Now be nice and define a function for updating the configuration(s):
def configure(root_url, **kwargs):
    default = kwargs.pop('default', True)
    kwargs['client_agent'] = 'example-client/' + __version__
    if 'headers' not in kwargs:
        kwargs['headers'] = {}
    kwargs['headers']['Accept-Type'] = 'application/json'
    if default:
        default_config.reset(root_url, **kwargs)
    else:
        Client.config = wac.Config(root_url, **kwargs
  • Now the big one, define your Client which is what will be used to talk to a server:
class Client(wac.Client):

    config = default_config

    def _serialize(self, data):
        data = json.dumps(data, default=self._default_serialize)
        return 'application/json', data

    def _deserialize(self, response):
        if response.headers['Content-Type'] != 'application/json':
            raise Exception(
                "Unsupported content-type '{}'"
                .format(response.headers['Content-Type'])
            )
        data = json.loads(response.content)
        return data
  • Then define your base Resource:
class Resource(wac.Resource):

    client = Client()
    registry = wac.ResourceRegistry()
  • And finally your actual resources:
class Playlist(Resource):

    type = 'playlist'

    uri_gen = wac.URIGen('/v1/playlists', '{playlist}')


class Song(Resource):

    type = 'song'

    uri_gen = wac.URIGen('/v1/songs', '{song}')
  • Done! Now you can do crazy stuff like this:
import example

example.configure('https://api.example.com', auth=('user', 'passwd'))

q = (example.Playlist.query()
    .filter(Playlist.f.tags.contains('nuti'))
    .filter(~Playlist.f.tags.contains('sober'))
    .sort(Playlist.f.created_at.desc()))
for playlist in q:
    song = playlist.songs.create(
        name='Flutes',
        length=1234,
        tags=['nuti', 'fluti'])
    song.length += 101
    song.save()

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Write your code and tests
  4. Ensure all tests still pass (python setup.py test)
  5. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  6. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  7. Create new pull request