Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Doing query param request in Django

Typically, I want my API endpoint url to be flat like this:

mydomain.com/shit_api/v1/person/123

That url is pretty straight forward, it's trying to get a person with an ID of 123 from shit_api. But that's not always clear cut.

I've been working on a particular API that needed a pair of optional filters that we're a pain to work out in a regular expression. And this is where I found about Django's QueryDict object. With it I can write out API urls with params:

mydomain.com/shit_api/v1/something/?filter1=value1&filter2=value2

And on the urls and views, I can handle it as such:

#urls.py
urlpatterns = [
   url(r'^parts/$', SomethingView.as_view()), name='Something'),
]
...

#views.py
class SomethingView(View):
   def get(self, request, *args, *kwargs):
      fiter1_value = request.GET.get('filter1', 'default')
      fiter2_value = request.GET.get('filter2', 'default')

      #do more here

      return Response('some response')

The thing here is that request.GET.get() method having a default value. This make it that having it on the URL it isn't a problem. So call like:

mydomain.com/shit_api/v1/something/

Will still work.

Bonus since I don't have to deal with a convoluted regular expression. Yehey!

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