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More Complex Organization

Sneaky REST APIs With Django Ninja Christopher Trudeau 05:04

Ninja doesn’t have strict requirements on where you define things. There’s no expectation about file names. In previous lessons, you’ve seen a single way of organizing your API. in this lesson, you’ll cover tools in Ninja for handling more complex structures.

00:00 In the previous lesson, I showed you a complete set of CRUD operations. In this lesson, I’ll show you a mix of organizational techniques you might use as you build larger interfaces with Ninja. These examples aren’t in the sample code.

00:13 I’m just going to show you the concepts. I will be using a couple of these techniques in later lessons.

00:21 You may find that a lot of your CRUD operations have similar things that have to be done for each. If so, it might be simpler to have a single view handle multiple HTTP operations.

00:33 You can do this in Ninja through the use of the api_operation decorator. It takes a list of HTTP operation names indicating what the view should accept. This can be particularly helpful if you need to write an API endpoint that uses an HTTP operation that doesn’t have a corresponding decorator, for example the HEAD or OPTIONS operations.

00:58 Here’s an example view using the api_operation decorator. The first thing the decorator takes is a list of operations. Then, like the other decorators, it takes a path inside of the view.

01:12 You can check the request.method attribute to see which operation was used.

01:19 In all of the example codes so far, I’ve been using routers and adding them to the NinjaAPI object. You don’t have to do this. You can actually use the API object directly.

01:31 Everything you’ve seen with the router can be done with the API object itself. If you’re writing a smaller application or you’re organizing all of your API calls inside of a single Django app, you don’t need the extra indirection of a router.

01:46 You can skip that step and use the API object itself.

01:52 If you’re not using a router and you’ve declared the API inside of an app, you just import that API object inside of your main urls file and use it inside of the path declaration like you’ve seen so far, no difference there.

02:09 There’s no limit on the number of NinjaAPI objects you create. If you have variations in configuration, you can create and map more than one ninja.

02:19 This can be particularly useful for API versioning. API versioning is the idea that all API calls include a version number in their path or in their header. But I prefer the path.