Flask developers call it a microframework, where micro (as explained here) means that the goal is to keep the core simple but extensible. Flask won’t make many decisions for us, such as what database to use or what template engine to choose. Lastly, Flask has extensive documentation that addresses everything developers need to start. FastAPI follows a similar “micro” approach to Flask, though it provides more tools like automatic Swagger UI and is an excellent choice for APIs. However, as it is a newer framework, many more resources and libraries are compatible with frameworks like Django and Flask but not with FastAPI. You’ll start off by adding the functionality to read a single note.
Any fixture defined in a conftest.py file can be used by all tests in the same directory or sub-directoy the conftest.py lives in. We define all fields that make up the PlayerSchema similarly to the way in which the fields were defined for the Flask-SQLAlchemy Player Model. With our schemas in place we now have the ability to easily dump, load, and validate our data coming and going from our API! Additionally, each of our schemas containts a @post_load decorated method. Each of these decorated methods is called when deserializing data, loading and returning the corresponding Model object for each Schema. With all the endpoints to handle your notes in place, it’s time to have a look at your API documentation.
What are APIs and Why Do They Matter?
Many APIs require authentication and authorization to ensure that only authorized users can access certain endpoints. You can use Flask extensions like Flask-JWT or Flask-OAuthlib to implement authentication and authorization in your API. Here, we use the get_json method to parse JSON data sent by the client and process it as needed. In the code above, we can specify the methods that will be supported by any particular rule.
You can also use routing with APIs, like creating a function in a separate file and using it as a decorator with a main Application use case. I hope it was easy to catch up with each heading, and if you have any queries, feel free to post them in the comment section below or connect with me. You raise the error response when the request body doesn’t contain a last name or when a person with this last name already exists. To achieve this, you’ll extend both the swagger.yml and people.py files to fully support the API defined above. In line 7, you tell the app instance to read the swagger.yml file from the specification directory and configure the system to provide the Connexion functionality. Part of the app instance creation includes the parameter specification_dir in line 6.
Additional Notes¶
Request.authorization → Returns an object of Authorization class. You can specify a function that should always execute before the request is processed by using app.before_request decorator. Any changes that you perform with your API appear on your front end, too. For update() to work, you also accept a note object as an argument, which contains the .content attribute that you may update. The note_id in parameters will be part of your endpoints to identify which note you want to handle. Now that your database contains data to work with, you can start displaying the data in both the front end and your REST API.
To switch on a particular URL, we use the add resource method and route it to the default slash. To run this file, you can use the POSTMAN tool, restful api python flask an API maintenance tool, to create, test, and manage APIs. You can also make use request module to try this API using the below code.