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So I'm almost totally new to web development as a whole, but have been thrown into a side project using Django to pull and parse data from a web service, and am struggling to understand exactly how things work, even while looking through the Django documentation.
In Django, I have everything set up and working at a basic level (using templates, a page is displayed saying "Hello World").
Now in order to pull the data from the webservice, I need to make a request to a URL of the following format:
http://wbsapi.withings.net/[service_name]?action=[action_name]&[parameters]
In the provided PHP example, they do this using cURL, and then json_decode.
What would I do to get similar functionality out of Django? Thanks in advance!
388
You would use urllib2 and json standard modules (or, alternatively, the excellent library requests and json):
import urllib2
import json
url = 'http://wbsapi.withings.net/[service_name]?action=[action_name]&[parameters]'
serialized_data = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
data = json.loads(serialized_data)
If you want it on a page, you want it in a view, which you will need to associate with an url.
Your urls.py will contain something like
from django.conf.urls import patterns, url, include
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^get_data/$', 'myapp.views.get_data'),
)
And your myapp/views.py will contain something like
from django.http import HttpResponse
import urllib2
import json
def get_data(request):
url = 'http://wbsapi.withings.net/[service_name]?action=[action_name]&[parameters]'
serialized_data = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
data = json.loads(serialized_data)
html = "<html><body><pre>Data: %s.</pre></body></html>" % json.dumps(data, indent=2)
return HttpResponse(html)
Of course, I don't know how you wanted your data to be displayed, so I just serialized it again :)
110
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