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pythonflasksqlalchemyflask-restless

Creating API responses with flask-restless

Let's say I have two models in SqlAlchemy:

  • UserType
  • User

User has a foreign key to UserType

I have properly configured flask-restless to serve these models as API endpoints:

  • /api/user
  • /api/user_type

But by default, when I visit either of these endpoints, I get the related data associated with each object in the response:

  • Each User has the corresponding UserType object nested in the response
  • Each UserType has a collection of User nested in the response

This will definitely lead to a lot of overhead as the data grows a lot. If I just want to GET the list of UserType that the system supports, all of the associated users will come back. Usually an API would generate a link for related resources:

  • /api/user/1/user_type
  • /api/user_type/1/users

Has anyone gotten these links out of flask-restless responses?

Solution

  • It looks like this is a known issue that has been active on GitHub for a long time. Not sure if the developer is planning on fixing it or not:

    https://github.com/jfinkels/flask-restless/issues/168#issuecomment-69821642

    I ended up going with flask-restful and building my own endpoints.