Question

I have a Django server responsible for serving JSON formatted files to a controller machine. My server gets data from POST requests and serve JSON files on GET requests. I’m wondering what is the most RESTful and efficient way of creating this bridge on the server?

I’m considering creating a JSON model and storing instances on my database for each POST request and pack the instances into JSON files dynamically and serve them on GET requests. The alternative would be creating JSON files on POST requests, saving them in a folder on the server, and serving these files on GET requests.

Which way is better and why? Or am I failing to see a completely better method?

Answer 1

I looked into json serialization with natural keys and dependencies etc. to control the fields that are serialized. I also tried using the middleware wodofstuff to allow for deeper foreign key serialization. However, I decided to use templates to render the JSON response.

Some pitfalls are

• I am responsible for formatting the JSON (more prone to mistakes like a missing semi-colon)
• I am responsible for escaping characters
• Renders slower than buit-in serialization?

Some advantages are

• I have control over what is serialized (even if the underlying models is changed)
• I can format many to many or foreign key relationships on the JSON file however I like

TLDL; In my case, the format of the JSON file I needed was very custom. It had dictionary in list in dictionary. Some fields are iterative so I have for loops in the templates to render them. However, the format requires some of the fields in the iterated object to be encapsulated in a list as oppose to a dictionary.

This was an obstacle I ran into while considering simplejson. By using something like

import simplejson as json
def encode_complex(obj):
    if isinstance(obj, complex):
        return [obj.real, obj.imag]
    raise TypeError(repr(o) + " is not JSON serializable")
json.dumps(2 + 1j, default=encode_complex)
'[2.0, 1.0]'

I could manage to return iterated data; however, I needed iteration in iteration and custom object types (list or dict) to encapsulate certain iterations. Finally, (may it be lack of knowledge or lack of patience) I decided to just do it in the templates.

I feel like rendering it through templates is not the most scalable or ‘smartest’ way of doing it, could it possibly be done in a better way? Please feel free to prove me right or wrong.