Addition of a rudimentary API

[kallewesterling]

I created a rudimentary API structure on top of the existing API library (Django's REST framework).

• It should now include ViewSets (which enable easily accessible GET requests for all the database objects -- with a recursive tracing of all child relations down 3 levels, defined in SESHAT_API_DEPTH (in seshat.apps.seshat_api.serializers.py -- we may want to move this into the settings file instead)

• All of the URLs are registered using the REST framework's DefaultRouter in seshat.apps.seshat_api.urls.py. The file's imports are split up by app, to make it more readable. It has also been formatted with black.

• The API should be accessible at /api/ (e.g. http://localhost:8000/api/) and then all access points should be divided into respective apps (e.g. http://localhost:8000/api/core/, http://localhost:8000/api/crisisdb/, etc)

• All (or at least almost all of them?) ViewSet have two Mixins added -- MixinSeshatAPISerializer, MixinSeshatAPIAuth. Those are defined in seshat.apps.seshat_api.views._mixins.py.

  • The MixinSeshatAPISerializer is used to automatically set the serializer_class of the ViewSet to the GeneralSerializer defined in the seshat.apps.seshat_api.serializers.py.
  • The MixinSeshatAPIAuth is used to automatically set the permission_classes of the ViewSet to the ones defined in a provided permissions_dict object (or reverting, by default to STANDARD_API_AUTHENTICATION which defines that HEAD, OPTION, and GET operations should be allowed for all, but any other methods are only open to authenticated users. You find STANDARD_API_AUTHENTICATION in seshat.apps.seshat_api.views._mixins.py. From what I've seen, we might want to make the authentication a bit more diversified (i.e. only allow POST, PUT for editors, RAs, etc...) We will need to discuss in a meeting.

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Note: I have now built a Python-flavoured way of connecting up to the API to programmatically interact with the models:

https://github.com/Seshat-Global-History-Databank/seshat_api

[kallewesterling]

@edwardchalstrey1 I'm happy to take a look at the conflicts here if you want

[edwardchalstrey1]

@edwardchalstrey1 I'm happy to take a look at the conflicts here if you want

Didn't seem to be any real conflicts, I just had to accept all the changes on the new branch as ok

[edwardchalstrey1]

Seems to be an issue with the Seshat logo introduced

[edwardchalstrey1]

Otherwise looks good, I can see the API is working 👍

[kallewesterling]

Seems to be an issue with the Seshat logo introduced

That's so strange! I'll have to look into that a bit more...!

[kallewesterling]

I fixed the problem — not sure why but it seems like the static files directory was not set up correctly.

[edwardchalstrey1]

I fixed the problem — not sure why but it seems like the static files directory was not set up correctly.

Looks like your commit is on the api-test branch on your fork but not here :)

[kallewesterling]

Silly me! Done!

[edwardchalstrey1]

@kallewesterling I have reverted the change to STATICFILES_DIRS , it looks like commenting out django_heroku also caused a problem. Do either of these interfere with the API somehow? As far as I can tell the site and API seem to both work properly now

or did STATICFILES_DIRS need to be set up differently on your local instance?

[kallewesterling]

Oh, I didn't see that django_heroku had been commented out. I don't really know why! Thanks for fixing that.

I couldn't get the logo to work unless I added the other static directory, but if you were able to get the logo to work with the original STATIC_FILES set up, I'm happy with that.