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Web API using Django and markup.py
I have a web application that has a set of web api. I want it to be XML base. Django has utilities to serialize the query set to json or XML but I want to output XML that is not django' format. Below is how I did that.
The XML generator
I use markup.py, intuitive, light weight, easy-to-use, customizable and pythonic HTML/XML generator (from its website). I didn't spend much time on this. You can use any XML generator.
Below is how I generate the XML,
import markup def get_lastest_post_api(request, num_post): posts = Post.objects.order_by('-created')[:int(num_post)] xml_response = get_post_xml_response(get_post_xml_response(posts)) return HttpResponse( xml_response, mimetype='text/xml', ) def get_post_xml_response(posts): xml = markup.page(mode='xml') xml.init(encoding='utf-8') xml.posts.open() for post in posts: xml.post.open() xml.title(_(post.title)) xml.user(_(post.user.username)) xml.body(_(post.body)) xml.date(_(str(post.created))) xml.tags(_(post.tags)) xml.allow_comments(post.allow_comments) xml.post.close() xml.posts.close() return xml
The XML generator _getpost_xml_response__ function take the query set as a parameter. It construct the markup, set the encoding to utf-8 and start the generation.
The XML generation is simple. I use xml.posts.open() to open the posts tag. After that, I iterate over the query set and create post tag and fill in the detail for each. To close the each post tag I use xml.post.close()
The XML Output
Below is example,
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' ?> <posts> <post> <title>python-markdown2</title> <user>admin</user> <body>this is the post body <date>2008-11-04 18:34:30.879000</date> <tags>python django markup</tags> <allow_comments>True</allow_comments> </post> </posts>