RESTful URLs with TurboGears¶

One idea behind a RESTful API is to make use of URLs like http://mysite/id/verb, where id is a database identifier and verb is an action to take, like “show”.

So, examples can be:

http://mysite/testpage/show
http://mysite/testpage/edit

To help you create such an API, you can define the following mixin class:

class content:

    @turbogears.expose()
    def default(self, *vpath, **params):
        if len(vpath) == 1:
            identifier = vpath[0]
            action = self.show
        elif len(vpath) == 2:
            identifier, verb = vpath
            verb = verb.replace('.', '_')
            action = getattr(self, verb, None)
            if not action:
                raise cherrypy.NotFound
            if not action.exposed:
                raise cherrypy.NotFound
        else:
            raise cherrypy.NotFound
        items = self.query(identifier)
        if items.count() == 0:
            raise cherrypy.NotFound
        else:
            return action(items[0], **params)

Using this class, you can implement your restful API as follows:

class Root(controllers.RootController, content):

    @turbogears.expose(template='myapp.templates.show_thing')
    def show(self, thing):
        return dict(text=thing.text)

    @turbogears.expose(template='myapp.templates.edit_form')
    def edit(self, thing):
        return dict(text=thing.text)

    def query(self, name):
        return model.something.byName(name=name)

See http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html for information on why RESTful urls are useful.

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RESTful URLs with TurboGears¶