python - Proper way to consume data from RESTFUL API in django

Question

I'm trying to learn django so while I have a current solution I'm not sure if it follows best practices in django. I would like to display information from a web api on my website. Let's say the api url is as follows:

http://api.example.com/books?author=edwards&year=2009

Thsis would return a list of books by Edwards written in the year 2009. Returned in the following format:

{'results':
             [
                {
                   'title':'Book 1',
                   'Author':'Edwards Man',
                   'Year':2009
                },
                {
                   'title':'Book 2',
                   'Author':'Edwards Man',
                   'Year':2009}
           ]
}

Currently I am consuming the API in my views file as follows:

class BooksPage(generic.TemplateView):
    def get(self,request):
        r = requests.get('http://api.example.com/books?author=edwards&year=2009')
        books = r.json()
        books_list = {'books':books['results']}
        return render(request,'books.html',books_list)

Normally, we grab data from the database in the models.py file, but I am unsure if I should be grabbing this API data in models.py or views.py. If it should be in models.py, can someone provide an example of how to do this? I wrote the above example sepecifically for stackoverflow, so any bugs are purely a result of writing it here.

Answer 1

I like the approach of putting that kind of logic in a separate service layer (services.py); the data you are rendering is quite not a "model" in the Django ORM sense, and it's more than simple "view" logic. A clean encapsulation ensures you can do things like control the interface to the backing service (i.e., make it look like a Python API vs. URL with parameters), add enhancements such as caching, as @sobolevn mentioned, test the API in isolation, etc.

So I'd suggest a simple services.py, that looks something like this:

def get_books(year, author):
    url = 'http://api.example.com/books' 
    params = {'year': year, 'author': author}
    r = requests.get(url, params=params)
    books = r.json()
    books_list = {'books':books['results']}
    return books_list

Note how the parameters get passed (using a capability of the requests package).

Then in views.py:

import services
class BooksPage(generic.TemplateView):
    def get(self,request):
        books_list = services.get_books('2009', 'edwards')
        return render(request,'books.html',books_list)

See also:

• Separation of business logic and data access in django