In my opinion a better approach is to expose the common functionality of your application in a way that both the regular application and the API can invoke. In addition, Flask also documented the usage of MethodView to allow developers to write their own restful APIs. In parallel, Flask-Restless promises to turn a SqlAlchemy class into a restful web service.
- As you learned above, writing SQL may not only feel inconvenient, but it can cause security issues.
- If you are looking for information on a specific function, class or
method, this part of the documentation is for you. - The new version that we just implemented starts by redefining the incomes variable into a list of Expenses and Incomes, now called transactions.
- In this part of the series, you’ll add a new table to store notes.
- FastAPI follows a similar “micro” approach to Flask, though it provides more tools like automatic Swagger UI and is an excellent choice for APIs.
The above test module thoroughly tests the PlayersResource class. Each function is an isolated test, testing a small portion of the code found in players_resource.py. Ideally, we would run this test often when making changes to our code, ensuring any new code causes no negative anywhere. Each test passes in our client restful api python flask pytest fixture found in our conftest.py file, allowing each test to access our database and Flask API. Pytest automatically finds this fixture for us, and there is no need to import it. The POST method reads a JSON request, and converts the incoming JSON to a Player model via our PlayerSchema and its load method.
Building a RESTful API with Flask: A Step-by-Step Guide
In this three-part tutorial series, you’re building a REST API to keep track of notes for people who may visit you throughout the year. You’ll create people like the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Knecht Ruprecht. The read_all() function responds to the REST API URL endpoint GET /api/people and returns all the records in the person database table. In this three-part tutorial series, you’re building a REST API to keep track of notes for people that may visit you throughout the year. Going further, you can learn about fastAPI too, which is a fast, modern, and high-speed framework for building APIs. With all the endpoints to manage people in place, it’s time to try out your API.
- Per its official definition, Flask is a lightweight WSGI web application framework.
- Then I will create a couple of products by making POST calls to /product/ with some data.
- To achieve this, you’ll extend both the swagger.yml and people.py files to fully support the API defined above.
Conceptually, you can think of a database table as a two-dimensional array where the rows are records, and the columns are fields in those records. SQLAlchemy provides an object-relational model (ORM), which stores each Python object to a database representation of the object’s data. That can help you continue to think in a Pythonic way and not be concerned with how the object data will be represented in a database. By using the sqlalchemy option, you also install packages that help your Flask app leverage the powers of SQLAlchemy. To convert complex data types to and from Python data types, you’ll need a serializer. Flask-Marshmallow extends the Marshmallow library and provides additional features when you work with Flask.
How to Make Flask API More Secure With Basic Authentication
You may also notice that not all the note model fields are present in the component schema. That’s okay, because you’ll only use this schema to post new notes. The main difference is that you need to provide a requestBody that contains the note data to update the database object. For now, you’re only reading from the database with the note_id parameter from the REST URL path.
Using OpenAPI with the Swagger UI offers a nice, clean way to create the API URL endpoints. In the next section, you’ll add additional endpoints to create, update, and delete people in your collection. In this three-part tutorial series, you’ll build a REST API to keep track of notes for people that may visit you throughout the year.
Getting Started
In the table above, there’s a timestamp column used to track the creation and update time of a person in the table. You also want to have similar functionality for the creation and update time for a note, but because timestamp is already used, a contrived name of note_timestamp is used. With conn.execute() you’re running the SQL command to create a person table with the columns id, lname, fname, and timestamp.
