Helpers, utils & @decorators

For your convenience, there’s a set of helpers and utilities you can use to help build out your API.

piston.utils.rc

One of those is rc from piston.utils. It contains a set of standard returns that you can return from your actions to indicate a certain situation to the client.

Since 26293e3884f4 , these return a fresh instance of HttpResponse, so you can use something like this:

resp = rc.CREATED
resp.write("Everything went fine!")
return resp

resp = rc.CREATED
resp.write("This will not have the previous 'fine' text in it.")
return resp

This change is backwards compatible, as it overrides __getattr__ to return a new instance rather than a singleton.

Variable	Result	Description
rc.ALL_OK	200 OK	Everything went well.
rc.CREATED	201 Created	Object was created.
rc.DELETED	204 (Empty body, as per RFC2616)	Object was deleted.
rc.BAD_REQUEST	400 Bad Request	Request was malformed/not understood.
rc.FORBIDDEN	401 Forbidden	Permission denied.
rc.NOT_FOUND	404 Not Found	Resource not found.
rc.DUPLICATE_ENTRY	409 Conflict/Duplicate	Object already exists.
rc.NOT_HERE	410 Gone	Object does not exist.
rc.NOT_IMPLEMENTED	501 Not Implemented	Action not available.
rc.THROTTLED	503 Throttled	Request was throttled.

direct_to_string

The direct_to_string method allows you to pass an API url to the API internally and receive the HttpResponse content that the API would render. It takes care of url reversing for you as well.

This is especially useful for bootstrapping views in your app to save on server round-trips for client / JS heavy apps.

from piston.utils import direct_to_string

def my_view(request):
   # ...
   api_preload = direct_to_string(request, '/api/v1/foos/')
   return render_to_response('template.html', {
        "bootstrapped_data": json_response
        })