I am used to creating webapplications with Wicket. There it is possible to generate a HTML page using POST, receiving a large JSON from the client (browser) to generate some charts. This can be done for example with CURL.
In Angular, I could not find a similar approach.
What is the recommended way to render a chart based on the JSON that a browser provides? An URL parameter is not really the way to go as the URL length is limited.
I can think of a work-around wheren I first post the data to some webservice, receive an id, and then pass that id to an URL in Angular, but that seems a lot of work for something simple :)
I am using Django for making a website. I am using an HTML form with GET as the method.
The problem is that by default the get url is like this:
/search?name=user&place=place
But I want it to be something like:
my_site/search/user/place
How can that be done?
Why not use POST as method and retrieve the parameters in your view from request.POST? In this way they won't appear in your url.
Also, if you're expecting a list of results i recommend using ListView from views.generic, and in the dispatch() method you'll retrieve your parameters based on which you'll filter the user model (i guess).
It is better with a get request immo, but if you want something like: my_site/search/user/place it is easy, you just have to define the variables in your url and get the arguments in your function.
You can find more detail in django documentation
The only way you can do this in the browser is with Javascript. You will need to build the URL from the form contents. There are many mistakes you can make around encoding the values for the URL. You should be asking why you want to do it this way instead of using the QUERY_PARAMS as the form is doing.
Decoding it with Django isn't that hard, they are just variables in the URL pattern, but unless you have some kind of earth shattering new technology, you should let the browser send them to you without using JS to handcraft the URL.
Using the GET method send data via the web page. This means that the URL can be copied and rechecked at any time.
Let's assume an web application that for each URI presents a nice html view for GET requests and allows to update the underlying resource through POST/PUT/PATCH/WHATEVER.
How do I then expose various forms that actually allow performing such requests from the browser? And broader: assuming I have alternative views (possibly also HTML) for the same resource, where do I put those? Arguably, such forms can be considered alternative views, so having an answer to the broader question would be ideal.
Edit: To clarify, my question is not about pure data APIs serving JSON or whatnot, but about HTML apps such as Stackoverflow. For example you can get the collection of questions under /questions and this particular one at /questions/24696982 which makes sense. To get the form to add a new question, you will have to use /questions/ask, which I'm not sure is alright. And that form POSTs to /questions/ask/submit, which seems just plain wrong. Making a GET request to that URL yields a 404 (if anything it should be a 405). The form should be POSTing to /questions. Still I would like to know whether at least the URI for the form is considered acceptable in a RESTful system.
You have a website like, the one way to build a real RESTFull API is to split the frontend and the API - thats in my opinion the best way (some may disagree) - maybe some other don't think like this but lets say the frontend team got www.domain and your team for the API got api.domain.
GET api.domain/questions - Retrieves a list of tickets
GET api.domain/questions/12 - Retrieves a specific ticket
POST api.domain/questions - Creates a new ticket
PUT api.domain/questions/12 - Updates ticket #12
DELETE api.domain/questions/12 - Deletes ticket #12
PATCH api.domain/questions/12 - Partially updates ticket #12 #I only want to display that this also exists - i don't really use it...
AWESOME EDIT: As you can see also stackoverflow uses this method: api.stackexchange.com
So as you can see you can have these structure - but you also can have a form on www.domain/questions/ask and this form would send the request to api.domain/questions via POST. I want to refer to: https://thenewcircle.com/s/post/1221/designing_a_beautiful_rest_json_api_video its a really nice podcast you should have heard.
EDIT: (another point of view)
Another idea is that you can simply choose which content should come back (Json,XML,HTML) if your client sends you the right Accept-Header.
Example 1:
URL REQUEST ACCEPT HEADER RESPONSE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
domain/questions GET application/json all questions as json
domain/questions GET text/html the page as html with all questions
domain/questions/ask GET text/html Your html for to add a new question
domain/questions POST application/json Add a new new questions (this would be called from ./ask to add the new questions
domain/questions/ask GET application/json 404 Status-Code because on questions/ask you don't have implemented any resource
Example-2:
URL REQUEST ACCEPT HEADER RESPONSE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
domain/questions/12 GET application/json Shows the questions with the ID 12 as JSON
domain/questions/12 GET text/html Shows the HTML representation of your page
domain/questions/12/edit GET text/html Your html for to edit a the question
domain/questions/12 PUT application/json Updates the questions with the ID 12 // just to add the PATCH thing.. i don't really use it but if you don't update the whole object you could/should use PATCH instead of PUT :p
domain/questions/12/edit GET application/json 404 Status-Code because on questions/ask you don't have implemented any resource
Yesterday I told you about the first idea (which is - I think for using an api as a team (one for frontend and one team that develops the api - a better way) but as #jackweirdy commented (thanks for that - i then searched a lot and was looking at other podcasts from developer around the world and how they would do that) below it's really all up to you - it's your api and at the end you/your team will decide for one way. Hope this helps you or other that looking for how to build a API on a REST background.
The examples in the EDIT-Section would be (if I got it right) not like here on stackoverflow
This is something I've had trouble with myself, and which I don't think there's a right answer to.
Assuming I have an API exposing /people/:id, I generally reserve an endpoint for /people/new. a GET request to that url with Accept: text/html will return a form for creation, but anything else will throw a 404, since this page only exists for people in a web browser. The form on that page will then post to /people/ as you'd expect.
Similarly, if someone wants to edit an existing person, the form to do that might be served from /people/1/update, again HTML only.
If your API has that structure, then I think reserving keywords such as new or update is perfectly reasonable.
As far as I can understand your question, you want an application that :
displays HTML pages (and eventually other formats ?)
displays form views for creation of new elements or for update of existing ones
accept POST/PUT with url encoded data (sent by submitting above forms) to create of update those elements (and eventually other formats ?)
Ruby on Rails is a framework that is targetted as this kind of requirement. Extract from the guide Rails Routing from the Outside In :
HTTP Verb Path action used for
GET /photos index display a list of all photos
GET /photos/new new return an HTML form for creating a new photo
POST /photos create create a new photo
GET /photos/:id show display a specific photo
GET /photos/:id/edit edit return an HTML form for editing a photo
PUT /photos/:id update update a specific photo
DELETE /photos/:id destroy delete a specific photo
You can have HTML views for the actions index, new, show and edit.
Personally, I would recommend to add the following :
POST /photos/:id update update a specific photo
POST /photos/:id/delete destroy delete a specific photo
so that it would be simpler to update or delete elements via html forms.
All those paths are only Rails convention and are not imposed by REST but it gives a clean example of what can be done.
But it is quite easy to make an application following the same or slightly different conventions using other frameworks. Java + Spring MVC can do that very easily, with HTML views using JSP, Velocity, Thymeleaf or others, and the possibility of using JSON in input or output simply using HTTP headers or suffixes in URL (GET /photos/:id.json) with a little less magic but more control than RoR. And I'm not an expert in other framework like Struts2 (still Java), or Django (Python) but I am pretty sure that it is possible too.
What is important :
choose a language (Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, ASP.NET, ...)
choose a framework compatible with RESTfull urls
ensure you can have views in HTML, or JSON, or enter the format you want by adding a suffix or a HTTP header and eventually the appropriate adapter/converter
You could do it by hand but frameworks limits boiler plate code.
The essence of REst was never about how URLs looks like,but how http verbs and headers are used to transfer datas.
This whole "restfull urls" thing is made up by people who dont understand what Rest is. All the Rest spec says is that URLs must be unique.
Now if you really want "restfull" forms,then form should be a resource with an id, like /form/2929929 .Of course it doesnt make sense to do so,since forms are strictly for web users and REst doesnt care about how data is acquiered, only about how it is transfered.
In short,choose whatever URL you want. Some frameworks use new and update for forms. By the way the /questions/ask/submit is totally valid in a Rest context, because what you submit and a question can be 2 totally difference resources.
You need to understand that there is a difference between a RESTfull application and a REST client.
A RESTfull application has pure restfull urls as you described, such as
GET /persons : gets a list of all the persons in database
POST /persons : adds a new person
GET /person/1 : gets a person with id 1
PUT /person/1 : updates person with id 1
DELETE /person/1 : deletes person with id 1
and so on...
Such an application does not have any forms or UI for submitting data. It only accepts data via HTTP requests. To use such an application you can send and receive data using tools like curl or even your browser, which allow you to make HTTP requests.
Now, clearly such an application is not usable from the user point of view. Hence we need to create client applications which consume these restfull applications. These clients are not restfull at all and have urls like:
GET /person/showall : displays a list of all persons
GET /person/create : shows new person form
POST /person/create : submits the data to the restfull application via ajax or simillar technology.
and so on...
These clients can be another HTML application, an android application, an iOS application, etc.
What you are trying to do here is create a single application which has both restful urls for objects as well as forms/pages for data display and input. This is absolutely fine.
Just make sure that you design proper restfull urls for your objects while you can have any url you find suitable for your forms.
In 100% RESTful Web services resources are identified using descriptive URLs, that is URLs composed only of noun phrases.
Generaly speaking, for creating a new resource, you would use PUT, although some frameworks (such as Zend Framework 2, if I remember well), use POST for this purpose. So, for creating a question you could PUT questions, then providing the question identifier in the body of the request, or PUT questions/{identifier}, thus providing the id in the URL.
Contemporary web/cloud applications have moved to what is known as a single page application architecture.
This architecture has a back end REST API (typically JSON based) which is then consumed by either single page applications or native client apps on mobile phones and tablet. The server is then much easier to implement and scale and provides the needed access regardless if its a web client or a native phone/tablet platform.
The client architecture is known as MV* for Model, View and * is anything else the framework provides such as controller logic and persistence.
In my applications I have used a number of MV* frameworks and libraries in anger and investigated many many more. I've had some success with backbone, and my favorite Ember.js, although there are many frameworks and everyone has their favorite for different reasons and that is a whole topic on its own. I will say that depending on the needs of your application different frameworks will be more or less appropriate. I know what matters to my productivity so I have settled on Ember after doing the rounds.
On the backend you have a similar myriad of choices but choose a platform that is known to be mature and stable ans same goes for your data persistence. There are a number of cloud services that give you a REST/JSON api with no coding or deployment concerns now so you can focus more on the client development and less on the server.
It is important to understand that in single page applications the browser url does not need to have a 1 to 1 correspondance with the backend rest api. In fact it would be detrimental to usability taking such a simple minded approach. Of all the client frameworks Ember gets this right as it has a built-in router, and as a result client state is captured in the URL so the page can survive a refresh and can also be bookmarked. You really can keep your client view independent to the backend api endpoints. I design my client URLs around the menu/structure of my forms. In complex apps the URLs nest as far as I need the app to partition and drill down into the details, yet the api endpoints are flat and may span multiple service providers. A view in my client app often assembles data from multiple endpoints and similarly on Accept/Save it pushes to multiple endpoints. It is also possible to implement local persistence so the web client can be used offline and so that temporary or half filled out forms can survive a page refresh.
Another consideration with such an architecture is SEO. With single page applications one needs to be able to provide prerendered pages to web crawlers. Fortunately there are a number of tools which can auto generate the pages for single page applications so that web crawlers can still index your sites content, tools such as pretender.io and many others can solve this for you.
At the end of all this you have a server with a number of REST endpoints and typically a single index.html, app.js app.css and any other assets such as images and fonts.
Typically you need a toolchain for generating these files from your source code which are then either hosted on your domain or on a CDN. I also configure my app and server for CORS so the web client can be hosted on a different domain to the REST back end which also works well in development.
I recommend the broccoli or ember-cli tool chain for assembling all your web client assets and I have also had good experience with Brunch. I've tried most of the tools out there and those are the only ones that get my vote.
For API design I've been actively providing feedback on the latest drafts of JSON API. There is a lot of good work being done there and you can use that as a good starting point.
Usually in production Web Applications I recommend separating how static content is delivered vs how dynamic content is delivered.
Let us hope you are not constrained by SEO and can actually use the wonder of DOM manipulation (ie Client-Side templating)...
I would highly recommend going down the path of learning how to create a SPA (Single Page Application)
However, back to the topic at hand.
Static content (HTML, CSS, Javascript, images) should be delivered thru a different server than your dynamic content (the REST data in json/xml format).
Your HTML should use JQuery/AngularJS/Backbone -- some type of JavaScript framework to actually "render" your HTML on the client-side using JavaScript.
The JavaScript frameworks will also make the proper RESTful calls to POST or PUT a form (which should be a UI representation of some REST path)
Lets say you have a form for a Profile,
GET /profile/{id} would be called to pre-populate a profile FORM
PUT /profile/{id} would be called to update the profile
** JavaScript will pre-populate the FORM by calling one or more RESTful GET methods.
** JavaScript will take entered data from FORM and POST/PUT it to the RESTful server.
The point you should take away from this is:
Let an advanced JavaScript library handle the sending of RESTful requests and "rendering" of the HTML.
HTML is only a template (static content) and can be hosted on a completely different server that is optimized for the job of delivering "static content" :)
Hope that makes sense.
Cheers!
P.S.
Learn about Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) if you have not already. You will likely need that knowledge to properly host your static content on a different server/domain than your dynamic content.
I am trying to build my application's admin UI using sling's userManager REST interface, but I would like to customize the json rendering. For example, I would like the response of "Get group" to include the members only if the requestor is a member.
I started by adding libs/sling/group/json.esp but I don't understand how I can get hold of the default response and customize it. Even if I had to query and form the json from scratch, where can I find information about APIs available to get this data from JCR/Sling?
I found that I could use ResourceTraversor to dump the resource object in json form but using new Packages.org.apache.sling.servlets.get.impl.helpers.ResourceTraversor(-1, 10000, resource, true) in the esp throws up an error
There are a few things to note here.
First, you should avoid putting your code under the libs directory. Your app code should live under the apps directory. When attempting to resolve a servlet for a URI, Sling will check apps before it checks libs so if you need to completely override functionality delivered with Sling, you would place your code in apps.
Second, what is (probably, depending on how you have things setup) happening when you request http://localhost:8080/system/userManager/group/administrators.tidy.1.json is the request is being handled by Sling's default GET servlet, because it finds no other script or servlet which is applicable. For research purposes it might be worth looking at the code for the default get servlet, org.apache.sling.servlets.get.impl.DefaultGetServlet, to see what it's using to render JSON. If you need to handle the rendering of a user group in a manner different than what the default GET servlet is doing, then you would need to create a servlet which is listening for requests for resources of type sling/group. It would probably be ideal to create a servlet for this purpose and register it with OSGI. http://sling.apache.org/site/servlets.html provides the various properties you would need to set to ensure the servlet resolver finds your servlet. Your servlet then would handle the request and as such would have direct and easy access to the requested resource.
Third, the particular need you specified is that you do not want the group members to render unless the requesting user is a member of the group requested. This is more of an access control issue than a rendering issue. Sling and Jackrabbit, out of the box, make as few assumptions as possible concerning how you might want your application to be setup. That being the case, you need to establish the access controls that are applicable for your particular use case. The wiki post on Access Control in the Jackrabbit wiki ( http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/AccessControl ) goes into this to an extent.
Using directions from Paul Michelotti's answer, I researched further and found a suitable solution to my problem.
Sling accepts request filters (javax.servlet.Filter) through SCR annotations like the one below
#SlingFilter(scope = SlingFilterScope.REQUEST, order = Integer.MIN_VALUE)
Every request is passed down to the filter before it is processed by the servlet. Using the resourceType, I was able to distinguish requests to group.1.json and group/mygroup.1.json. Since the filter also has access to the current user, I was able to decide to deny the request if it did not abide by my security model and return a 404 status code.
Please refer to this page for details on filters. You can also check out the sample project urlfilter for directions on usage.
I have a URI for a collection of resources called 'facts', and URIs for each 'fact' resource in that collection.
The form for creating a new 'fact' should be requested with a GET, I believe, but I'm having trouble deciding what URI it should be made to.
A GET to the collection URI should return a list of the 'fact' resource URIs. Each 'fact' URI should return its contents as a response to GET. The actual 'fact' creation would be a POST (or PUT, depending on the situation), of course.
I see a few options, but none seem satisfactory:
Add a 'fact form' URI which the 'facts' URI will reference. A GET to this URI gives the HTML form. Seems wrong to have another resource just for a description of a resource.
A POST made to the 'facts' URI without including any form data in the headers would return the form. Then after the user fills the form in, it would POST with the form data, and create the new 'fact' resource. This seems like an even worse approach.
Don't send the form over the wire, but include it as part of the API. This seems RESTful since a REST API should describe the media types, and a form can be made from a description of the 'fact' type. This is weird to implement. Maybe the REST service is separate from the regular web site, so that the actual HTML form request is at some URI apart from the REST API.
Include the HTML form as part of the 'facts' URI response.
To clarify, I'm trying to follow true REST architecture as specified by Roy Fielding, not half-baked RPC posing as REST.
edit: I'm starting to think #3 is on to something.
edit2: I think a solution is to have regular non-REST HTML navigation in a CRUD manner, and then the frontend makes AJAX REST calls as appropriate (or the backend makes internal calls to its REST API).
The reason I need to do the REST part of this service correctly is that I want to allow other non-HTML clients to interact with it later on.
In my mind, the only cleanly RESTful answers are 1 and 3.
As I see it, the description of the resource is a resource of its own. The question is whether you want to make this resource accessible through your application's API or if you want to make it part of the API itself.
For 1, it seems RESTful make the URIs something like this:
GET /facts -> all facts
GET /facts/1 -> returns fact 1 (obviously the id might be a word or something else)
GET /facts/create -> returns a form appropriate for creating a fact
POST /facts -> adds a fact
I think you're overcomplicating things a bit. A web browser is just not a perfect REST client, so you can't have a perfectly RESTful solution. In a perfect world, you would not need a form at all, because the web browser would know your media types and build the form itself.
Meanwhile, I suggest you just use what most REST frameworks would call an additional "view" on the resource to return a form:
E.g. /your/collectionresource?view=form, or /your/collectionresource;form