PyRuby blog » REST http://www.pyruby.com Just another WordPress weblog Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:03:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Stubbing a REST api in Python http://www.pyruby.com/2009/10/06/stubbing-a-rest-api-in-python/ http://www.pyruby.com/2009/10/06/stubbing-a-rest-api-in-python/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:58:19 +0000 PyRuby http://www.pyruby.com/?p=15 For the last few jobs I’ve had, Service Oriented Architecture has been a strong theme. Having services presenting REST apis that consume and produce XML has been the regular approach. When it comes to testing consumers of those services, I have found Python to be an extremely useful and convenient tool. It’s [...]]]> For the last few jobs I’ve had, Service Oriented Architecture has been a strong theme. Having services presenting REST apis that consume and produce XML has been the regular approach. When it comes to testing consumers of those services, I have found Python to be an extremely useful and convenient tool. It’s quick and easy to throw an HTTP server up in Python, and hard code the values that it returns. The problem is though, that I have ended up just adding code to the do_GET / do_POST methods as I add tests that handle different expectations. This ends up separating the expectations and return values from the test, and making maintaining the stub code harder than it should be.

To resolve this, I’d like to add expectations of the stub http server in the same way as with defining mocks. The syntax would look something like this

  1.    server.expect(method="GET", url="/address/\d+$").
  2.         and_return(mime="text/xml", file_content="path/to/response.xml")
  3.     capture = {}
  4.     server.expect(method="PUT", url="/address/\d+$", data_capture=capture).
  5.         and_return(reply_code=201)
  6.     server.expect(method="POST", url="address/\d+/inhabitant", data=‘<inhabitant name="Chris"/>’).
  7.         and_return(reply_code=204)
  8.     server.expect(method="GET", url="/monitor/server_status$").
  9.         and_return(content="<html><body>Server is up</body></html>", mime_type="text/html")
  10.     # execute system under test
  11.     self.assertEquals("<expected><xml/></expected>", capture["body"])
  12.  

So, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be putting this together, which should among other things allow me to improve the end to end testing story for djangoRESTModel.

]]> http://www.pyruby.com/2009/10/06/stubbing-a-rest-api-in-python/feed/ 1 Django REST models http://www.pyruby.com/2009/09/28/django-rest-models/ http://www.pyruby.com/2009/09/28/django-rest-models/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:05:07 +0000 PyRuby http://www.pyruby.com/?p=4 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

  1. <address id="123" num="3301">
  2.   <street>8th Street</street>
  3.   <city>Saskatoon</city>
  4.   <province>SK</province>
  5.   <country>Canada</country>
  6. </address>

The model might be defined as

  1. class Address(xml_models.Model):
  2.   id = xml_models.IntField(xpath="/address/@id")
  3.   num = xml_models.IntField(xpath="/address/@num")
  4.   street = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/street")
  5.   city = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/city")
  6.   province = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/province")
  7.   country = xml_models.CharField(xpath="/address/country")
  8.  
  9.   finders = { (id,): "http://myaddressbook.com/addresses/%s" ,
  10.                     (num,street): "http://myaddressbook.com/addresses/num/%s/street/%s"}
  11.  

And using the finder method would be like this

  1. 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.

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