Piston Module for Django APIs

One of the most frequent requirement is providing third-party support in the we application. In this case we generally make an app which handles the API calls, which sets up the views, andsubsequently compiles the data which is then sent in the supported and safe format such as JSON. This also evoked the need to provide some documentation for these API calls and their usage.

In Django, piston solves all our purpose in a go.

django-piston can be installed using pip,

pip install django-piston

Piston is able to provides every little thing we need to create an API in our site withou. It need a few steps to install and to begin with enlist ‘piston’ into INSTALLED_APPS, so that Django can recognize it.

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Note(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField()
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    body = models.TextField()

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

Further steps involve:

1. create <api> app.

2. Define the namespace in the <api> app in entry level urls.py.

urlpatterns = patterns(”,

#other url mappings listed

(r’^api/’, include(‘piston_test.api.urls’)),
)

# next we need to define the resource.

3. create a file named handler.py projectRoot/api/. The file should containg the following code.

from piston.handler import BaseHandler
from myapp.models import Note

class NoteHandler(BaseHandler):
    allowed_methods = ('GET',)
    model = Note

    def read(self, request, id=None):
        if id:
            return Note.objects.get(pk=id)
        else:
            return Note.objects.all()

4. At Last, we need to map our urls to the resources in handler. Like:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from piston.resource import Resource
from piston_test.api.handlers import NoteHandler

note_handler = Resource(NoteHandler)

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^note/(?P<id>[^/]+)/', note_handler),
    url(r'^notes/', note_handler),
)

Interestingly, urlpatterns in url.py appear similar to the norm followed and that is the beauty of using Piston.

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Thanks