django-rest-framework/docs/tutorial/1-serialization.md

Tutorial 1: Serialization

Introduction

This tutorial will walk you through the building blocks that make up REST framework. It'll take a little while to get through, but it'll give you a comprehensive understanding of how everything fits together.

Setting up a new environment

Before we do anything else we'll create a new virtual environment, using virtualenv. This will make sure our package configuration is keep nicely isolated from any other projects we're working on.

mkdir ~/env
virtualenv --no-site-packages ~/env/djangorestframework
source ~/env/djangorestframework/bin/activate

Now that we're inside a virtualenv environment, we can install our package requirements.

pip install django
pip install djangorestframework

Note: To exit the virtualenv environment at any time, just type deactivate. For more information see the virtualenv documentation.

Getting started

Okay, we're ready to get coding. To get started, let's create a new project to work with.

django-admin.py startproject tutorial
cd tutorial

Once that's done we can create an app that we'll use to create a simple Web API.

python manage.py startapp blog

The simplest way to get up and running will probably be to use an sqlite3 database for the tutorial. Edit the tutorial/settings.py file, and set the default database "ENGINE" to "sqlite3", and "NAME" to "tmp.db".

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': 'tmp.db',
        'USER': '',
        'PASSWORD': '',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': '',
    }
}

We'll also need to add our new blog app and the djangorestframework app to INSTALLED_APPS.

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'djangorestframework',
    'blog'
)

We also need to wire up the root urlconf, in the tutorial/urls.py file, to include our blog views.

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^', include('blog.urls')),
)

Okay, we're ready to roll.

Creating a model to work with

For the purposes of this tutorial we're going to start by creating a simple Comment model that is used to store comments against a blog post. Go ahead and edit the blog app's models.py file.

from django.db import models

class Comment(models.Model):
    email = models.EmailField()
    content = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

Don't forget to sync the database for the first time.

python manage.py syncdb

Creating a Serializer class

We're going to create a simple Web API that we can use to edit these comment objects with. The first thing we need is a way of serializing and deserializing the objects into representations such as json. We do this by declaring serializers, that work very similarly to Django's forms. Create a file in the project named serializers.py and add the following.

from blog import models
from djangorestframework import serializers


class CommentSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    email = serializers.EmailField()
    content = serializers.CharField(max_length=200)
    created = serializers.DateTimeField()
    
    def restore_object(self, attrs, instance=None):
        """
        Create or update a new comment instance.
        """
        if instance:
            instance.email = attrs['email']
            instance.content = attrs['content']
            instance.created = attrs['created']
            return instance
        return models.Comment(**attrs)

The first part of serializer class defines the fields that get serialized/deserialized. The restore_object method defines how fully fledged instances get created when deserializing data.

We can actually also save ourselves some time by using the ModelSerializer class, as we'll see later, but for now we'll keep our serializer definition explicit.

Working with Serializers

Before we go any further we'll familiarise ourselves with using our new Serializer class. Let's drop into the Django shell.

python manage.py shell

Okay, once we've got a few imports out of the way, we'd better create a few comments to work with.

from blog.models import Comment
from blog.serializers import CommentSerializer
from djangorestframework.renderers import JSONRenderer
from djangorestframework.parsers import JSONParser

c1 = Comment(email='leila@example.com', content='nothing to say')
c2 = Comment(email='tom@example.com', content='foo bar')
c3 = Comment(email='anna@example.com', content='LOLZ!')
c1.save()
c2.save()
c3.save()

We've now got a few comment instances to play with. Let's take a look at serializing one of those instances.

serializer = CommentSerializer(instance=c1)
serializer.data
# {'email': u'leila@example.com', 'content': u'nothing to say', 'created': datetime.datetime(2012, 8, 22, 16, 20, 9, 822774)}

At this point we've translated the model instance into python native datatypes. To finalise the serialization process we render the data into json.

stream = JSONRenderer().render(serializer.data)
stream
# '{"email": "leila@example.com", "content": "nothing to say", "created": "2012-08-22T16:20:09.822"}'

Deserialization is similar. First we parse a stream into python native datatypes...

data = JSONParser().parse(stream)

...then we restore those native datatypes into to a fully populated object instance.

serializer = CommentSerializer(data)
serializer.is_valid()
# True
serializer.object
# <Comment object at 0x10633b2d0>

Notice how similar the API is to working with forms. The similarity should become even more apparent when we start writing views that use our serializer.

Writing regular Django views using our Serializers

Let's see how we can write some API views using our new Serializer class. We'll start off by creating a subclass of HttpResponse that we can use to render any data we return into json.

Edit the blog/views.py file, and add the following.

from blog.models import Comment
from blog.serializers import CommentSerializer
from djangorestframework.renderers import JSONRenderer
from djangorestframework.parsers import JSONParser
from django.http import HttpResponse


class JSONResponse(HttpResponse):
    """
    An HttpResponse that renders it's content into JSON.
    """

    def __init__(self, data, **kwargs):
        content = JSONRenderer().render(data)
        kwargs['content_type'] = 'application/json'
        super(JSONResponse, self).__init__(content, **kwargs)

The root of our API is going to be a view that supports listing all the existing comments, or creating a new comment.

def comment_root(request):
    """
    List all comments, or create a new comment.
    """
    if request.method == 'GET':
        comments = Comment.objects.all()
        serializer = CommentSerializer(instance=comments)
        return JSONResponse(serializer.data)

    elif request.method == 'POST':
        data = JSONParser().parse(request)
        serializer = CommentSerializer(data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            comment = serializer.object
            comment.save()
            return JSONResponse(serializer.data, status=201)
        else:
            return JSONResponse(serializer.error_data, status=400)

We'll also need a view which corrosponds to an individual comment, and can be used to retrieve, update or delete the comment.

def comment_instance(request, pk):
    """
    Retrieve, update or delete a comment instance.
    """
    try:
        comment = Comment.objects.get(pk=pk)
    except Comment.DoesNotExist:
        return HttpResponse(status=404)

    if request.method == 'GET':
        serializer = CommentSerializer(instance=comment)
        return JSONResponse(serializer.data)

    elif request.method == 'PUT':
        data = JSONParser().parse(request)
        serializer = CommentSerializer(data, instance=comment)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            comment = serializer.object
            comment.save()
            return JSONResponse(serializer.data)
        else:
            return JSONResponse(serializer.error_data, status=400)

    elif request.method == 'DELETE':
        comment.delete()
        return HttpResponse(status=204)

Finally we need to wire these views up, in the tutorial/urls.py file.

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url

urlpatterns = patterns('blog.views',
    url(r'^$', 'comment_root'),
    url(r'^(?P<pk>[0-9]+)$', 'comment_instance')
)

It's worth noting that there's a couple of edge cases we're not dealing with properly at the moment. If we send malformed json, or if a request is made with a method that the view doesn't handle, then we'll end up with a 500 "server error" response. Still, this'll do for now.

Testing our first attempt at a Web API

TODO: Describe using runserver and making example requests from console

TODO: Describe opening in a web browser and viewing json output

Where are we now

We're doing okay so far, we've got a serialization API that feels pretty similar to Django's Forms API, and some regular Django views.

Our API views don't do anything particularly special at the moment, beyond serve json responses, and there's some error handling edge cases we'd still like to clean up, but it's a functioning Web API.

We'll see how we can start to improve things in part 2 of the tutorial.