Consuming JSON API data with Django - json

Question

From a Django app, I am able to consume data from a separate Restful API, but what about filtering? Below returns all books and its data. But what if I want to grab only books by an author, date, etc.? I want to pass an author's name parameter, e.g. .../authors-name or /?author=name and return only those in the json response. Is this possible?
views.py
def get_books(request):
response = requests.get('http://localhost:8090/book/list/').json()
return render(request, 'books.html', {'response':response})
So is there a way to filter like a model object?

Answer 1

I can think of three ways of doing this:
Python's filter could be used with a bit of additional code.
QueryableList, which is the closest to an ORM for lists I've seen.
query-filter, which takes a more functional approach.
1. Build-in filter function
You can write a function that returns functions that tell you whether a list element is a match and the pass the generated function into filter.
def filter_pred_factory(**kwargs):
def predicate(item):
for key, value in kwargs.items():
if key not in item or item[key] != value:
return False
return True
return predicate
def get_books(request):
books_data = requests.get('http://localhost:8090/book/list/').json()
pred = filter_pred_factory(**request.GET)
data_filter = filter(pred, books_data)
# data_filter is cast to a list as a precaution
# because it is a filter object,
# which can only be iterated through once before it's exhausted.
filtered_data = list(data_filter)
return render(request, 'books.html', {'books': filtered_data})
2. QueryableList
QueryableList would achieve the same as the above, with some extra features. As well as /books?isbn=1933988673, you could use queries like /books?longDescription__icontains=linux. You can find other functionality here
from QueryableList import QueryableListDicts
def get_books(request):
books_data = requests.get('http://localhost:8090/book/list/').json()
queryable_books = QueryableListDicts(books_data)
filtered_data = queryable_books.filter(**request.GET)
return render(request, 'books.html', {'books':filtered_data})
3. query-filter
query-filter has similar features but doesn't copy the object-orient approach of an ORM.
from query_filter import q_filter, q_items
def get_books(request):
books_data = requests.get('http://localhost:8090/book/list/').json()
data_filter = q_filter(books_data, q_items(**request.GET))
# filtered_data is cast to a list as a precaution
# because q_filter returns a filter object,
# which can only be iterated through once before it's exhausted.
filtered_data = list(data_filter)
return render(request, 'books.html', {'books': filtered_data})
It's worth mentioning that I wrote query-filter.