Interacting with Django Tastypie API Using Python Librarys

If you already have some django web-app, consider extending its functionality with django-tastypie. It has pretty decent docs as well. With django-tastypie you can create RESTful Web Service. I am not going to talk about django-tastypie in this post, instead I would like to share how to interact with django-tastypie api using python's urllib and urllib2 libraries.

The following codes gives some idea about how to get data using the API, with ApiKeyAuthentication method.

import urllib, urllib2

api_url = 'http://localhost:8080/api/app1/model1/?username=apiuser1&api_key=apikey_for_apiuser1'
http_req = urllib2.Request(api_url, headers={'ACCEPT': 'application/json, text/html'})
try:
    resp = urllib2.urlopen(http_req)
    contents = resp.read()
    print contents
except urllib2.HTTPError, error:
    print he.getcode()


The codes below gives some idea about how to create data using the API, with ApiKeyAuthentication method.


import urllib, urllib2
import simplejson as json


api_url = 'http://localhost:8080/api/app1/model1/?username=apiuser1&api_key=apikey_for_apiuser1'
json_post = json.dumps({"model_name": "TEST13"})
http_req = urllib2.Request(api_url, json_post, {'Content-Type': 'application/json', 'ACCEPT': 'application/json, text/html'})
try:
response = urllib2.urlopen(http_req)
print response.read()
print response.getcode()
print response.info()
print response.msg
except urllib2.HTTPError as he:
print he.getcode()
print he.info()
print he.msg
except urllib2.URLError as ue:
print ue

Both examples using json data format. Remember to set the appropriate Content-Type and ACCEPT header data if using different data format.
If it is necessary to use https secure connection and proxy, refer to this post to get more information.