django-rest-framework/docs/howto/reverse.rst

Returning URIs from your Web APIs
=================================

As a rule, it's probably better practice to return absolute URIs from you web
APIs, e.g. "http://example.com/foobar", rather than returning relative URIs,
e.g. "/foobar".

The advantages of doing so are:

* It's more explicit.
* It leaves less work for your API clients.
* There's no ambiguity about the meaning of the string when it's found in
  representations such as JSON that do not have a native URI type.
* It allows us to easily do things like markup HTML representations
  with hyperlinks.

Django REST framework provides two utility functions to make it simpler to
return absolute URIs from your Web API.

There's no requirement for you to use them, but if you do then the
self-describing API will be able to automatically hyperlink its output for you,
which makes browsing the API much easier.

reverse(viewname, ..., request=None)
-------------------------------

The `reverse` function has the same behavior as
`django.core.urlresolvers.reverse`_, except that it optionally takes a request
keyword argument, which it uses to return a fully qualified URL.

    from djangorestframework.reverse import reverse
    from djangorestframework.views import View
   
    class MyView(View):
        def get(self, request):
            context = {
                'url': reverse('year-summary', args=[1945], request=request)
            }

            return Response(context)

reverse_lazy(viewname, ..., request=None)
------------------------------------

The `reverse_lazy` function has the same behavior as
`django.core.urlresolvers.reverse_lazy`_, except that it optionally takes a
request keyword argument, which it uses to return a fully qualified URL.

.. _django.core.urlresolvers.reverse: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse
.. _django.core.urlresolvers.reverse_lazy: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse-lazy