Making external XML REST apis more pythonic
At work we have a Django web application where the models are backed by a Java XML REST api. The application is read only, so there is no requirement to write back to the REST api.
We started with copying the data into a local DB, and using regular Django DB models, and we wanted something that would feel very similar, but use an XML REST backend. We wrote an xml_models library, which allowed us to map our models to the XML data, using a declarative style similar to the Django DB models. The library has been open sourced and can be found on sourceforge.
Here is a simple example:-
Suppose there was an API http://myaddressbook.com/addresses/{addressID} that returns the following XML
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<address id="123" num="3301">
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<street>8th Street</street>
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<city>Saskatoon</city>
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<province>SK</province>
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<country>Canada</country>
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</address>
The model might be defined as
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class Address(xml_models.Model):
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id = xml_models.IntField(xpath="/address/@id")
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num = xml_models.IntField(xpath="/address/@num")
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street = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/street")
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city = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/city")
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province = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/province")
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country = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/country")
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finders = { (id,): "http://myaddressbook.com/addresses/%s" ,
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(num,street): "http://myaddressbook.com/addresses/num/%s/street/%s"}
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And using the finder method would be like this
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address = Address.objects.get(id=123)
That’s the basics. We are mapping much more complex relationships with collection fields, date fields and more. Take a look and let me know what you think.