How do I do this in my Django URLs? (.json, .xml)

Question

Suppose this is my URL route:

(r'^test/?$','hello.life.views.test'),

How do I make it so that people can do .json, .xml, and it would pass a variable to my views.test, so that I know to make json or xml?

Answer 1

Pass xml or json as a parameter. You can catch it in the URL like this (r'^test/(?P < doc_type > [^\/]+)$','hello.life.views.test'),

Answer 2

to add to @ziang's answer, if you really want to emulate file extensions you could just write the regular expression that way. r'^test\.(?P<extension>(json)|(xml))$'

EDIT: I will add that it's certainly more RESTful to provide the expected return content type as a parameter.

Answer 3

I have implement something similar:

 (r'^test$', 'test'), 
 (r'^test/(?P<format>json)$', 'test'),

And in views.py, I have something like:

def list(request, format="html"):
    if format == 'json':
        ...
    elif format == 'html':
        ...
    ...

I have specify two similar url patterns because I want to keep the extension part optional, and when ignored the default format (html in my case) is used.

It seems like I can't implement this with an optional pattern in regex, because doing something like (?P<format>json)? would result in a None value and the default value will never be used.

Hope this experience can be helpful for you.

Answer 4

I choose a default (json) for my api. If the end-developer wants to work against a different format (yaml, xml, etc) I let them send it as a get parameter:

http://api.mysite.com/getinfo/?format=xml

def get_info_view(request):
    format = request.GET.get(format, None)
    if format:
        # handle alternate (non-json) format
    return json_object