calling web services from python

We will use our own web service we built earlier to interact with, run this in a separate terminal

from flask import Flask, jsonify, request, abort

app=Flask(__name__)

data=[{'fname':'Steve', 'lname':'Jobbs'},{'fname':'Bill', 'lname':'Gates'}]

@app.route('/createperson', methods=['POST'])
def create_person():
	print(request.json)
	if not request.json or not 'person' in request.json:
		abort(400)
	data.append(request.json['person'])
	return jsonify({'data' : data}), 201

@app.route('/data', methods=['GET'])
def get_data():
	return jsonify({'data' : data})

@app.route('/data/', methods=['GET'])
def get_data_byid(id):
	return jsonify({'data' : data[id]})

app.run(debug = True)

​Calling GET

​We have previously looked at fetching JSON from weather web services, here we will apply same concept to extract the JSON from our own web service

import urllib.request
import json
from pprint import pprint

page = urllib.request.urlopen("http://127.0.0.1:5000/data")
content=page.read()
content_string = content.decode("utf-8")

json_data = json.loads(content_string)

pprint(json_data)

​Output:

{'data': [{'fname': 'Steve', 'lname': 'Jobbs'},
          {'fname': 'Bill', 'lname': 'Gates'},
          {'fname': 'Sergey', 'lname': 'Brin'}]}

Exercise: how would I print just the first names?

for item in json_data['data']:
	print(item['fname'])

​calling POST

import httplib2
from json import dumps, loads

url = "http://127.0.0.1:5000/createperson"
data = dumps({"person":{"fname":"Larry", "lname":"Page"}})
header = {"Content-Type":"application/json","User-Agent":"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)"}
http=httplib2.Http()
response = http.request(url,"POST",headers=header,body=data)

Validate the new data has been added by invoking the ​http://127.0.0.1:5000/data