An API created with the Django Rest Framework
Here I have followed the tutorial from https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ to learn how to create an API. I learned how to make Serializers, define their fields by using Django Rest Framework's Serializers class HyperlinkedModelSerializer, to represent relationships using a URL instead of a primary key. Using a URL instead makes the API easier to understand, they can see the whole resources URL and don't need to find documentation to clarify. It also makes it so you don't have to construct resource URLs in the frontend when you want to retrieve related objects. This was my introduction to the Meta Class and type. The tutorial guided me in naming the URL patterns.
I made use of Django's class based views and Django Rest Framework decorators to include the Serializers I made and DRF's Permissions to handle authentication. I use the DRF's Viewsets to provide CRUD procedures.
I created a permissions.py file to custom define object level permissions in the class IsOwnerOrReadOnly which we import into views to restrict updating to only authenticated users and create another user class for looking at snippets without accessing them. We build the IsOwnerOrReadOnly from DRF's BasePermission class from Permissions.
I also make use of the ReadOnlyModelViewSet class from Django Rest Framework's viewsets to create the read only views. Then multiple views are created from each ViewSet class by binding the HTTP methods to the action for each view and registering them with the URL conf utilizing format_suffix_patterns to provide an endpoint for the API.
The tutorial uses the browsable API so you can login and create snippets in the browser.
http responses
browsable API
logged into browsable API
choosing data format
data in API format
data in JSON format
