Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method
The following table shows the HTTP verbs, the scope, and the semantics for the methods that our new API must support. Each method is composed by an HTTP verb and a scope and all the methods have well-defined meanings for all the resources and collections.
We want our API to be able to update a single field for an existing resource, and therefore, we will provide an implementation for the PATCH method. The PUT method is meant to replace an entire resource and the PATCH method is meant to apply a delta to an existing resource. In addition, our RESTful API must support the OPTIONS method for all the resources and collection of resources.
We don't want to spend time choosing and configuring the most appropriate ORM, as seen in our previous API; we just want to finish the RESTful API as soon as possible to start interacting with it. We will use all the features and reusable elements included in Django REST Framework to make it easy to build our API. We will work with a PostgreSQL database. However, in case you don't want to spend time installing PostgreSQL, you can skip the changes we make in Django REST Framework ORM configuration and continue working with the default SQLite database.
In the preceding table, we have a huge number of methods and scopes. The following list enumerates the URIs for each scope mentioned in the table, where {id} has to be replaced with the numeric id or the primary key of the resource:
- Collection of game categories:
/game-categories/ - Game category:
/game-category/{id}/ - Collection of games:
/games/ - Game:
/game/{id}/ - Collection of players:
/players/ - Player:
/player/{id}/ - Collection of scores:
/player-scores/ - Score:
/player-score/{id}/
Let's consider that http://localhost:8000/ is the URL for the API running on the Django development server. We have to compose and send an HTTP request with the following HTTP verb (GET) and request URL (http://localhost:8000/game-categories/) to retrieve all the stored game categories in the collection:
GET http://localhost:8000/game-categories/