Creating API for SQLAlchemy Table using Flask-Restless

Question

I use Python, Flask, Flask-SQLAlchemy and Flask-Restless to create a RESTful API. The database contains a table user. Each user can follow other users and each user can be followed by other users (like in Twitter). So I also have a table followers to link the users (I partially followed Miguel's tutorial). This is my code:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from flask import Flask

from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from flask.ext.restless import APIManager

# Create the Flask application and the Flask-SQLAlchemy object.
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite:////tmp/test.db'
db = SQLAlchemy(app)

followers = db.Table('followers',
    db.Column('follower_id', db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('user.id'), nullable=False),
    db.Column('followed_id', db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('user.id'), nullable=False)
)

# Model declaration
class User(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.Unicode, nullable=False)
    # some other properties...
    followed = db.relationship('User', 
        secondary=followers, 
        primaryjoin=(followers.c.follower_id == id), 
        secondaryjoin=(followers.c.followed_id == id), 
        backref=db.backref('followers', lazy='dynamic'), 
        lazy='dynamic')

# Create the database tables.
db.create_all()

# Create the Flask-Restless API manager.
manager = APIManager(app, flask_sqlalchemy_db=db)

# Create API endpoints, which will be available at /api/<tablename> by
# default. Allowed HTTP methods can be specified as well.
manager.create_api(User, methods=['GET', 'POST'])

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

To add a new user in the database is easy:

from requests import post

user = {'name':'John Doe'}
post('http://localhost:5000/api/user', json=user)

But what kind of request should I do to add something in the followers table?

Sakib Ahammed · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-16 11:31:13Z

1

You need to use PATCH.

From this docs:

PATCH /api/person/1

HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com

    { "computers":
      {
        "add": [ {"id": 1} ]
      }
    }

In your case you would do something like:

from requests import patch

follower = {'id':'37'}
cmd = {'followed': { 'add': [ follower ] } }
patch('http://localhost:5000/api/user/1', json=cmd)

edited Oct 16, 2015 at 11:31

Sakib Ahammed

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answered Oct 15, 2015 at 18:37

doog abides

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1 Comment

clemtoy Over a year ago

Now I understand, thank you. There was another problem in my code which was disturbing me: in my code, db.relationship(...) was not assigned to anything so the field was not created in the database. Now I assign it to a field followed. I fixed your answer to take this change into account. Thank you very much.

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