Part V: More on API’s with F1

So from the last post we have all our code in place for our F1 api, now we are looking  at the following:

1.  Retrieving Status codes
2. Filtering our query

Status code

What are status code? And why are they important?

Status codes tell us whether a HTTP request was successful or not. So there are 5 classes in which these response are categorized.

• Informational: 1XX
• Successful: 2XX
• Redirect: 3XX
• Client Error: 4XX
• Server Error:5XX

I have explained this in depth  in HTTP post for more info. Now I am running the the server for my F1 website, and I want to get the status of the request I made. Following code shows how to do this.

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>>> import requests
>>> url = ‘http://192.168.43.135:8000/laps/’
>>> response = requests.get(url)
>>> print(response.status_code)
200       

The request has succeeded.

        

 Filtering   

The response variable is of type <class ‘requests.models.Response’> we convert it to either json or xml. On typing reponse.json() data is converted into<type ‘list’> and as we all know we can iterate thru a list. Following is an example of how to go forward with this:

import requests
url = 'http://192.168.43.135:8000/laps/'
response = requests.get(url)
racer_data = response.json()
for racer in racer_data:
    if racer['driver_name'] == 'Nino Farina':
        print(racer)

{u'car_model': u'ALFA ROMEO', u'grand_prix': u'Great Britain', u'driver_name': u'Nino Farina', u'id': 8, u'time_taken': u'1:50.600'}

On iterating thru the list we have a condition, if the condition is true we print the enter racer’s record.

Also there is another way to filter data, we need to define a list of dict called filter. This dict will have 3 component name of the field, operation{eq, like,==}, and val.  Following is a code snippet to implement this.

import requests
import json

url = 'http://192.168.43.135:8000/laps/'
headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}

filters = [dict(name='car_model', op='like', val='ALFA ROMEO')]
params = dict(q=json.dumps(dict(filters=filters)))

response = requests.get(url, params=params, headers=headers)
assert response.status_code == 200
print(response.json())

{u'car_model': u'ALFA ROMEO', u'grand_prix': u'Great Britain', u'driver_name': u'Nino Farina', u'id': 8, u'time_taken': u'1:50.600'}