REST

Introduction

In this section we’ll look at how you could go about implementing a RESTful web service with Morepath.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer, and is a particular way to design web services. We won’t try to explain here why this can be a good thing for you to do, just explain what is involved.

REST is not only useful for pure web services, but is also highly relevant for web application development, especially when you are building a single-page rich client application in JavaScript in the web browser. It can be beneficial to organize the server-side application as a RESTful web service.

Elements of REST

That’s all rather abstract. Let’s get more concrete. It’s useful to refer to the Richardson Maturity Model for REST in this context. In REST we do the following:

  • We uses HTTP as a transport system. What you use to communicate is typically JSON or XML, but it could be anything.
  • We don’t just use HTTP to tunnel method calls to a single URL. Instead, we model our web service as resources, each with their own URL, that we can interact with.
  • We use HTTP methods meaningfully. Most importantly we use GET to retrieve information, and POST when we want to change information. Along with this we also use HTTP response status codes meaningfully.
  • We have links between the resources. So, one resource points to another. A container resource could point to a link that you can POST to create a new sub resource in it, for instance, and may have a list of links to the resources in the container. See also HATEOAS.

Morepath has features that help you create RESTful applications.

HTTP as a transport system

We don’t really need to say much here, as Morepath is of course all about HTTP in the end. Morepath lets you write a bare-bones view using morepath.App.view(). This also lets you pass in a render function that lets you specify how to render the return value of the view function as a morepath.Response. If you use JSON, for convenience you can use morepath.App.json() has a JSON render function baked in.

We could for instance have a Document model in our application:

class Document(object):
    def __init__(self, title, author, content):
        self.title = title
        self.author = author
        self.content = content

We can expose it on a URL:

@App.path(model=Document, path='documents/{id}')
def get_document(id=0):
   return document_by_id(id)

We assume here that a document_by_id() function exists that returns a Document instance by integer id from some database, or None if the document cannot be found. Any way to get your model instance is fine. We use id=0 to tell Morepath that ids should be converted to integers, and to with a BadRequest if that is not possible.

Now we need a view that exposes the resource to JSON:

@App.json(model=Document)
def document_default(self, request):
    return {
      'type': 'document',
      'id': self.id,
      'title': self.title,
      'author': self.author,
      'content': self.content
    }

Modeling as resources

Modeling a web service as multiple resources comes pretty naturally to Morepath. You think carefully about how to place models in the URL space and then expose them using morepath.App.path(). Each model class can only be exposed on a single URL (per app), which gives them a canonical URL automatically.

A collection resource could be modelled like this:

class DocumentCollection(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.documents = []
        self.id_counter = 0

    def add(self, doc):
        doc.id = self.id_counter
        self.id_counter += 1
        self.documents.append(doc)
        return doc

We now want to expose this collection to a URL path /documents. We want:

  • when you GET /documents we want to get the ids documents in the collection.
  • when you POST to /documents with a JSON body we want to add it to the collection.

Here is how we can make documents available on a URL:

documents = DocumentCollection()

@App.path(model=DocumentCollection, path='documents')
def get_document_collection():
    return documents

When someone accesses /documents they should get a JSON structure which includes ids of all documents in the collection. Here’s how to do that (for GET, the default):

@App.json(model=DocumentCollection)
def document_collection_default(self, request):
    return {
       'type': 'document_collection',
       'ids': [doc.id for doc in self.documents]
    }

We also want to allow people to POST new documents (as a JSON POST body):

@App.json(model=DocumentCollection, request_method='POST')
def document_collection_post(self, request):
    json = request.json
    result = self.add(Document(title=json['title'],
                               author=json['author'],
                               content=json['content']))
    return request.view(result)

We use Request.view() to return the JSON structure for the added document again. This is handy as it includes the id field.

HTTP response status codes

When a view function returns normally, Morepath automatically sets the response HTTP status code to 200 Ok.

When you try to access a URL that cannot be routed to a model because no path exists, or because the function involved returns None, or because the view cannot be found, a 404 Not Found error is raised.

If you access a URL that does exist but with a request method that is not supported, a 405 Method Not Allowed error is raised.

What if the user sends the wrong information to a view? Let’s consider the POST view again:

@App.json(model=DocumentCollection, request_method='POST')
def document_collection_post(self, request):
    json = request.json
    result = self.add(Document(title=json['title'],
                               author=json['author'],
                               content=json['content']))
    return request.view(result)

What if the structure of the JSON submitted is not a valid document but contains some other information, or misses essential information? We should reject it if so. We can do this by raising a HTTP error ourselves. WebOb, the request/response library upon which Morepath is built, defines a set of HTTP exception classes webob.exc that we can use:

@App.json(model=DocumentCollection, request_method='POST')
def document_collection_post(self, request):
    json = request.json
    if not is_valid_document_json(json):
        raise webob.exc.HTTPUnprocessableEntity()
    result = self.add(Document(title=json['title'],
                               author=json['author'],
                               content=json['content']))
    return request.view(result)

Now we raise 422 Unprocessable Entity when the submitted JSON body is invalid, using a function is_valid_document_json that does the checking. is_valid_document could look this:

def is_valid_document_json(json):
   if json['type'] != 'document':
      return False
   for name in ['title', 'author', 'content']:
      if name not in json:
         return False
   return True

load

The code that checks the validity of the POST or PUT body in the view can be moved out into a load function that you can use in multiple views:

def load(request):
   if not is_valid_document_json(json):
       raise webob.exc.HTTPUnprocessableEntity()
   return request.json

@App.json(model=DocumentCollection, request_method='POST', load=load)
def document_collection_post(self, request, json):
    result = self.add(Document(title=json['title'],
                               author=json['author'],
                               content=json['content']))
    return request.view(result)

The return value of the load function is passed in as a third argument into the view function. This means that you can also do conversion of input in the load function and reuse it between views. And if the load fails to work you get a 422 status code.

Linking: HATEOAS

We’ve now reached the point where many would say that this is a RESTful web service. But in fact a vital ingredient is still missing: hyperlinks. That ugly acronym HATEOAS thing.

Morepath makes it easy to create hyperlinks, so we won’t have to do much. Before we had this for the collection view:

@App.json(model=DocumentCollection)
def document_collection_default(self, request):
    return {
       'type': 'document_collection',
       'ids': [doc.id for doc in self.documents]
    }

We can change this so instead of ids, we return a list of document URLs instead:

@App.json(model=DocumentCollection)
def document_collection_default(self, request):
    return {
       'type': 'document_collection',
       'documents': [request.link(doc) for doc in self.documents],
    }

Now we’ve got HATEOAS: the collection links to the documents it contains. The developers looking at the responses your web service sends get a few clues about where to go next. Coupling is looser.

We have HATEOAS, so at last we got true REST. Why is hyperlinking so often ignored? Why don’t more systems implement HATEOAS? Perhaps because they make linking to things too hard or too brittle. Morepath instead makes it easy. Link away!

Compose from reusable apps

If you’re going to create a larger RESTful web service, you should start thinking about composing them from smaller applications. See App Reuse for more information.