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                  <li class="main">
                    <a href="#returning-urls">Returning URLs</a>
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                    <li>
                      <a href="#reverse">reverse</a>
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                      <a href="#reverse_lazy">reverse_lazy</a>
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                <a class="github" href="https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/tree/master/rest_framework/reverse.py">
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            <h1 id="returning-urls">Returning URLs</h1>
<blockquote>
<p>The central feature that distinguishes the REST architectural style from other network-based styles is its emphasis on a uniform interface between components.</p>
<p>&mdash; Roy Fielding, <a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_1_5">Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a rule, it's probably better practice to return absolute URIs from your Web APIs, such as <code>http://example.com/foobar</code>, rather than returning relative URIs, such as <code>/foobar</code>.</p>
<p>The advantages of doing so are:</p>
<ul>
<li>It's more explicit.</li>
<li>It leaves less work for your API clients.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>It makes it easy to do things like markup HTML representations with hyperlinks.</li>
</ul>
<p>REST framework provides two utility functions to make it more simple to return absolute URIs from your Web API.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="reverse">reverse</h2>
<p><strong>Signature:</strong> <code>reverse(viewname, *args, **kwargs)</code></p>
<p>Has the same behavior as <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse"><code>django.core.urlresolvers.reverse</code></a>, except that it returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.</p>
<p>You should <strong>include the request as a keyword argument</strong> to the function, for example:</p>
<pre><code>from rest_framework.reverse import reverse
from rest_framework.views import APIView
from django.utils.timezone import now

class APIRootView(APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        year = now().year
        data = {
            ...
            'year-summary-url': reverse('year-summary', args=[year], request=request)
        }
        return Response(data)
</code></pre>
<h2 id="reverse_lazy">reverse_lazy</h2>
<p><strong>Signature:</strong> <code>reverse_lazy(viewname, *args, **kwargs)</code></p>
<p>Has the same behavior as <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse-lazy"><code>django.core.urlresolvers.reverse_lazy</code></a>, except that it returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.</p>
<p>As with the <code>reverse</code> function, you should <strong>include the request as a keyword argument</strong> to the function, for example:</p>
<pre><code>api_root = reverse_lazy('api-root', request=request)
</code></pre>

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