What does create_list refer to in Tastypie's custom authorisation?

Question

I've been studying the Tastypie API documentation for custom authorisation.

There are eight possible methods to implement to create a custom authorisation class.

• read_list
• read_detail
• create_list
• create_detail
• update_list
• update_detail
• delete_list
• delete_detail

I am really struggling to understand the semantics of each of these methods. How exactly do they correspond to HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE... etc.)?

Initially, I thought that the *_list methods might mean...

Give me a list of all objects that the user can [create, read, update, delete]

But the "create" case...

Give me a list of all objects that the user can create

...really doesn't make sense, since the objects have already been created. In order to make sense with my interpretation, this would have to be a list of all possible objects the user could create (which is clearly infeasible).

So what does create_list actually mean? What about create_detail and how does it differ to create_list?

Thanks for clarifying!

Answer 1

The question is about philosophy and concepts, and there are actually 3 questions, but let me try to answer you question briefly.

---

*_list vs *_detail:

*_list methods are filters of objects user has an access to.

*_detail methods are booleans that tell us, whether we can have an access to the exact object.

Example:

read_list - filters objects, that user will see on site.com/api/v1/cool_object/

read_detail - tells us whether user is allowed to view site.com/api/v1/cool_object/2

---

Mapping CRUD to HTTP (Tastypie):

CREATE - POST

READ - GET

UPDATE - PUT (to upload new entity) / PATCH (to send changed fields only)

DELETE - DELETE

---

Why create_list:

The method was added just for the sake of uniformity and consistency. So you were right to see no practical sense in it.

We can even check it in the tastypie/authorization.py:

def create_list(self, object_list, bundle):
    """
    Unimplemented, as Tastypie never creates entire new lists, but
    present for consistency & possible extension.
    """