Mapping URLs

URL mappings in Piston work just like they do in Django. Lets map our BlogpostHandler:

In urls.py:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from piston.resource import Resource
from mysite.myapp.api.handlers import BlogpostHandler

blogpost_handler = Resource(BlogpostHandler)

urlpatterns = patterns('',
   url(r'^blogpost/(?P<post_slug>[^/]+)/', blogpost_handler),
   url(r'^blogposts/', blogpost_handler),
)

Now any request coming in to /api/blogpost/some-slug-here/ or /api/blogposts/ will map to BlogpostHandler, with the two different data sets being differentiated in the handler itself. Note that a single handler can be used both for single-object and multiple-object resources.

Anonymous Resources

Resources can also be “anonymous”. What does this mean? This is a special type of resource you can instantiate, and it will be used for requests that aren’t authorized (via OAuth, Basic or any authentication handler.)

For example, if we look at our BlogpostHandler from earlier, it might be interesting to offer anonymous access to posts, although we don’t want to allow anonymous users to create/update/delete posts. Also, we don’t want to expose all the fields authorized users see.

This can be done by creating another handler, inheriting AnonymousBaseHandler (instead of BaseHandler.) This also takes care of the heavy lifting for you.

Like so:

from piston.handler import AnonymousBaseHandler, BaseHandler

class AnonymousBlogpostHandler(AnonymousBaseHandler):
   model = Blogpost
   fields = ('title', 'content')

class BlogpostHandler(BaseHandler):
   anonymous = AnonymousBlogpostHandler
   # same stuff as before

You don’t need a “proxy handler” subclassing BaseHandler to use anonymous handlers, you can just point directly at an anonymous resource as well.