TurboGears – RESTful Applications

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. REST is web standards based architecture and uses HTTP Protocol for data communication. It revolves around a resource where every component is a resource and a resource is accessed by a common interface using HTTP standard methods. REST was first introduced by Roy Fielding in 2000.

What is a RestController

RestController in TurboGears provides a mechanism to access the request’s method, not just the URL. Standard HTTP verbiage includes: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. The RestController supports these, and also adds a few shortcuts for URL dispatch that makes displaying the data as forms and lists, a little easier for the user.

To explain how RESTful works with TurboGears, we are going to define a simple webservice that exposes a list of students.

The code for student model is given below −

model\student.py

# -* - coding: utf-8 -*-
from sqlalchemy import *

from sqlalchemy.orm import mapper, relation, relation, backref
from sqlalchemy import Table, ForeignKey, Column
from sqlalchemy.types import Integer, Unicode, DateTime
from hello.model import DeclarativeBase, metadata, DBSession
from datetime import datetime

class student(DeclarativeBase):
   __tablename__ = 'student'
   
   uid = Column(Integer, primary_key = True)
   name = Column(Unicode(20), nullable = False, default = '')
   city = Column(Unicode(20), nullable = False, default = '')
   address = Column(Unicode(100), nullable = False, default = '')
   pincode = Column(Unicode(10), nullable = False, default = '')

Now create a controller based on RestController and provide a view function to list out list of students in json format.

Controllers\student.py

from tg import RestController
from tg import expose
from hello import model
from hello.model import DBSession
from hello.model.student import student
from tg.decorators import with_trailing_slash

class StudentController(RestController):
   @expose('json')
   def get_all(self):
      students = DBSession.query(student).all()
      return dict(students=students)

Mount this StudentController in RootController of application by incorporating following lines in root.py −

from hello.controllers.student import StudentController

class RootController(BaseController):

   students = StudentController()

Going to the http://localhost:8080/students it will provide the list of our students encoded in json format.

We use the post method to define how we go about saving our student to the database. This method gets called whenever the http://localhost:8080/student url is accessed using a POST request − 

@expose('json')
def post(self, name, city, address, pincode):
   newstudent = student(name = name, city = city, address = address, pincode = pincode)
   DBSession.add(newstudent)
   DBSession.flush()
   return dict(student = newstudent)

Using the get_one() method, we can display one item from the database to the user −

@expose('json')
def get_one(self, movie_id):
   newstudent = DBSession.query(student).get(uid)
   return dict(movie = movie)

PUT is the method used for updating an existing record using REST − 

@expose('json')
def put(self, name = name, city = city, address =  address, pincode = pincode, **kw):
   newstudent = DBSession.query(student).get(name)
   newstudent.name = name
   newstudent.city = city
   newstudent.address = address
   newstudent.pincode = pincode
   return dict(student = newstudent)

The work-horse of delete is attached to the post_delete method. Here we actually remove the record from the database, and then redirect back to the listing page −

@expose('json')
def post_delete(self, uid, **kw):
   newstudent = DBSession.query(student).get(uid)
   DBSession.delete(newstudent)
   return dict(movie = newstudent.uid)
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