Proper way to consume data from RESTFUL API in django

Question

I'm trying to learn django so while I have a current solution I'm not sure if it follows best practices in django. I would like to display information from a web api on my website. Let's say the api url is as follows:

http://api.example.com/books?author=edwards&year=2009 

Thsis would return a list of books by Edwards written in the year 2009. Returned in the following format:

{'results':              [                 {                    'title':'Book 1',                    'Author':'Edwards Man',                    'Year':2009                 },                 {                    'title':'Book 2',                    'Author':'Edwards Man',                    'Year':2009}            ] } 

Currently I am consuming the API in my views file as follows:

class BooksPage(generic.TemplateView):     def get(self,request):         r = requests.get('http://api.example.com/books?author=edwards&year=2009')         books = r.json()         books_list = {'books':books['results']}         return render(request,'books.html',books_list) 

Normally, we grab data from the database in the models.py file, but I am unsure if I should be grabbing this API data in models.py or views.py. If it should be in models.py, can someone provide an example of how to do this? I wrote the above example sepecifically for stackoverflow, so any bugs are purely a result of writing it here.

Answer 1

I like the approach of putting that kind of logic in a separate service layer (services.py); the data you are rendering is quite not a "model" in the Django ORM sense, and it's more than simple "view" logic. A clean encapsulation ensures you can do things like control the interface to the backing service (i.e., make it look like a Python API vs. URL with parameters), add enhancements such as caching, as @sobolevn mentioned, test the API in isolation, etc.

So I'd suggest a simple services.py, that looks something like this:

def get_books(year, author):     url = 'http://api.example.com/books'      params = {'year': year, 'author': author}     r = requests.get(url, params=params)     books = r.json()     books_list = {'books':books['results']}     return books_list 

Note how the parameters get passed (using a capability of the requests package).

Then in views.py:

import services class BooksPage(generic.TemplateView):     def get(self,request):         books_list = services.get_books('2009', 'edwards')         return render(request,'books.html',books_list) 

See also:

• Separation of business logic and data access in django

Answer 2

Use the serializer instead of .json, as it gives flexibility to return in a number of formats.As while using rest-api , the provided serializer use is preferred.

Also keep the data handling and get data requests in view.py.The forms are used for templating not as the business logic.