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With resources defined and everything connected with Blueprints, it's time to handle incoming arguments. Flask-RESTful provides a solid tool known as Reqparse for specifying and validating submitted data.
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Our resources are ready for
action, but they don't yet
0:00
know how to take in input from our users.
0:03
We need some way of telling them what
pieces of data they should expect,
0:05
like a title and URL for the courses, and
also what those pieces of data should be.
0:08
Title should be strings, for example.
0:13
If we were doing this with models and
0:16
views, we'd use a form or
some other sort of validation library.
0:17
Flask restful actually provides
a validation library for
0:21
us that works really well,
it's called reqparse, and it's for
0:24
parsing requests,
let's go see how to use it.
0:27
So once I get reqparse set up,
0:31
I'm gonna be using Postman to
test the API that I'm building.
0:33
This is a good time for you to go and
get it installed though, there is both
0:37
a Chrome app and an OS X app, both are
free and work more or less the same way.
0:40
I'll put a link to their
site in the teachers notes.
0:45
I'm going to go ahead and
put in the Chrome app though, because,
0:48
you know, I'm running Chrome.
0:51
And the cool thing is,
0:52
it pops up here in your little bar and
then you hit Postman and there's Postman,
0:56
so cool, I'm going to skip
that go straight to the app.
1:02
Reqparse tells the API how
to parse incoming requests.
1:06
If you've used the Python module
arg pars it's pretty similar so
1:10
what I wanna do this over here and
courses.py, I need to import reqparse.
1:15
And then, I'm gonna add a parser
to the course list thing here
1:25
first of the course list resource.
1:29
I don't know why I call it a thing,
it's just a thing today.
1:31
All right, so, inside init,
we're gonna do self.reqparse
1:34
= reqparse.RequestParser,
1:40
sometimes you just can't
predict the variable names.
1:45
And so self.reqparse.add_argument,
so we add arguments to
1:49
the parser for each of the things that we
want to have come in each of the fields.
1:55
So for courses, I want to have one for
title, I wanna have one for URL.
2:01
So let's add title first.
2:05
It is true, it is required,
you have to have it.
2:09
If you don't give it to me, I'm going
to say, no course title provided.
2:12
I could just say,
no title provided, but either way.
2:16
And then location is actually going to be
a list, it's going to be form and json.
2:20
So what this says is that, I need to tell
reqparse where to look for this data.
2:26
So, I'm telling it to look
in forming coded data or
2:34
to look in json data,
which is in the body of the request.
2:37
Whichever one comes last is
the one that's looked at first,
2:41
it's a little weird, but
that's the way that one works.
2:45
All right so let's add the other argument
here, self.reqparse.add_argument,
2:49
you can probably guess
how most of this goes.
2:54
It's going to be url, required=true,
2:57
help=No course URL provided,
3:02
and location is gonna equal form,
and json.
3:07
There are lots of other locations,
I will link
3:11
to that documentation in the teacher's
notes, so you can check that out.
3:14
Everything here is fairly straightforward,
this is very similar to a forms library,
3:18
where you're kinda specifying
what all this stuff is.
3:22
And by the way, if you're familiar with
REST you might be thinking form here is
3:26
form data and it's not it's the X dash
dab dab dash form URL link encoded
3:32
header which is like the standard
one that HTML forms send.
3:38
So the basically the idea here is
you can send a form to your API and
3:43
it'll work just like you were sending
an XHR request or something like that.
3:46
And then at the end here,
I do want to go ahead and
3:50
call super, and call init on that.
3:56
All right, so there we go.
4:00
This just makes sure that the standard
set up goes ahead and it happens.
4:04
Let's look over here at Postman,
now the cool thing is you can you see this
4:08
history thing you can save your post and
stuff, which is kinda neat.
4:12
So, let's come over here and
4:16
get the URL, which is that one, all right.
4:20
If I do a get to courses and
send, then I get back Json.
4:25
That's cool,
that's exactly what we expected to get.
4:33
Okay, so let's try and
do just a blank post to
4:35
it and I get back method is not
allowed for this requested URL.
4:41
You know what I forgot all about that,
I didn't add a post, did I?
4:46
All right let's go,
we've got to get, let's add a post.
4:49
All right it's a def post(self),
all right, and
4:53
then let's actually break
apart these arguments.
4:58
So args=self.reqparse .parse_args,
5:02
I dare you to say that
line like five times fast.
5:06
And we're gonna return jsonify,
you know what, we're gonna return.
5:11
We're gonna return nothing.
5:17
Okay, so we get the same
response back on get or post but
5:20
on post it parses these args.
5:23
All right, so now,
5:25
I should be able to post it because the
method's allowed now, I should have it.
5:27
So let's hit send and
no course title provided, that's right,
5:31
I didn't provide a course title.
5:37
And if you look here, you can see
the status is a 400 bad request.
5:39
So good, that's what i should
get because it is a bad request,
5:43
it doesn't have all of the right data.
5:46
All right so let's come over to body and
let's say raw and
5:49
then we're going to put in
title is Python Collections.
5:54
Okay, so we're just gonna send that,
that's all we're gonna send.
5:59
Can I change, yeah.
6:04
So JSON application JSON, okay, so send.
6:06
And what did I get here,
I got No course URL provided,
6:11
which is also true,
I did not provide a URL.
6:17
All right, now, let's say URL and
6:20
i'm just gonna send python-collections
because I'm just playing with this,
6:23
I don't know what I'm doing.
6:29
Let's send that, and I get back the data.
6:30
Wow, okay, so I got back a 200,
6:36
everything's okay, and
I got back the data.
6:41
This isn't what I wanted to get though,
because python-collections,
6:43
right here, that's not a valid URL.
6:47
So we need to make the parsers smarter.
6:50
Okay flask REST will come with
a bunch of predefined inputs,
6:52
you can make your own but
you often probably don't have to though.
6:56
The one that I need is included,
so I'm going to use it.
7:00
So I'm gonna come up here to reqparse and
I'm also import inputs,
7:03
going to have a lot of
imports here from restful.
7:09
So, now title here by default
these are always strings so
7:13
I don't need to add anything there.
7:16
So here on add argument, I'm going to add
a new argument to the argument and I'm
7:18
gonna be type and I am going to put the
type is a URL and it comes from inputs.
7:23
So now let's see what happens
when I try to post a bad URL.
7:30
So I hit send, and now I've got the 400,
and the no course URL provided.
7:35
Great, because that's true,
I did not send a URL.
7:40
All right, so
now what if I send an actual valid URL?
7:45
Let's come back over here
https://teamtreehouse.com/library/python--
7:48
collections.
7:55
All right, so send that.
7:56
I have 200 and I got back my courses list.
7:58
So cool, that's the 200 that I expected.
8:02
I want to add one more part,
I wanna actually save the model instance.
8:05
I'm not going to about
changing the output though.
8:08
Because that's just a lot of trouble for
right now and
8:11
we'll deal with that in a minute.
8:13
So I've got models imported already,
so that's cool.
8:15
So then down here once I parse the args,
8:18
the args basically become
a dictionary of all these items.
8:21
So I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do
models.Course.create(**args).
8:25
And that will take the args dictionary and
feed all of that data into Course.create.
8:31
So, cool, and now, if I go and
submit my thing again,
8:38
still got a 200 and
I don't have a way to look at this yet.
8:44
We'll check out the data that's in
the database, in the next video.
8:49
For now though,
8:53
I'm gonna add the rest of these request
parsers, while you do a code challenge.
8:53
You should try and do the requests
parsers yourself too, to both course,
8:57
singular, and to review list and review.
9:01
And in the next video you
can compare yours to mine.
9:04
Reqparse handles the request part
of the request response cycle,
9:06
we still need to deal
with the response half.
9:11
We'll do that in the next video.
9:13
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