Calling flask restful API resource methods

Question

I\'m creating an API with Flask that is being used for a mobile platform, but I also want the application itself to digest the API in order to render web content. I\'m wondering

Answer 1

Another approach is to have both the app and API in the same Flask(-RESTful) instance. Then, you can have the app call the API methods/functions internally (without HTTP). Let's consider a simple app that manages files on a server:

# API. Returns filename/filesize-pairs of all files in 'path'  
@app.route('/api/files/',methods=['GET'])
def get_files():
    files=[{'name':x,'size':sys.getsizeof(os.path.join(path,x))} for x in os.listdir(path)]
    return jsonify(files)

# app. Gets all files from the API, uses the API data to render a template for the user 
@app.route('/app/files/',methods=['GET'])
def app_get_files():
    response=get_files() # you may verify the status code here before continuing  
    return render_template('files.html',files=response.get_json())

You can push all your requests around (from the API to the app and back) without including them in your function calls since Flask's request object is global. For example, for an app resource that handles a file upload, you can simply call:

@app.route('/app/files/post',methods=['POST'])
def app_post_file():
   response=post_file()
   flash('Your file was uploaded succesfully') # if status_code==200
   return render_template('home.html')

The associated API resource being:

@app.route('/api/files/',methods=['POST'])
def post_file():
   file=request.files['file']
   ....
   ....
   return jsonify({'some info about the file upload'})

For large volumes of application data, though, the overhead of wrapping/unwrapping JSON makes Miguel's second solution preferrable.

In your case, you would want to call this in your contoller:

response=FooAPI().post(id)