Extracting specific data field from Django Rest Framework api

Question

I've recently complete the Django Rest Framework api tutorial and am having a difficult time understanding specifically how it's used as a backend for an application I plan to develop (this is my first venture into backend development). To put more simply, I don't understand how querying will work from the front end. Navigating through the api with either the browser or httpie makes sense, but I'm at a loss for how a frontend extracts specified data from a model.

For example, let's say I have the following:

Models

class Snippet(models.Model):
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True, default='')
    code = models.TextField()
    linenos = models.BooleanField(default=False)
    language = models.CharField(choices=LANGUAGE_CHOICES, default='python', max_length=100)
    style = models.CharField(choices=STYLE_CHOICES, default='friendly', max_length=100)
    highlighted = models.TextField()

Serializers

class SnippetSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Snippet
        fields = ('id', 'title', 'code', 'linenos', 'language', 'style', 'url', 'highlight')

Views

class SnippetViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Snippet.objects.all()
    serializer_class = SnippetSerializer

If I'm a user on the other end of an application, how would I query 'language' inside of the Snippet model? How would I have access to whatever information is in 'language', and in what way would a frontend need to interact with my api to obtain this information?

My problem isn't necessarily how to build the api, but how to interact with it. Any help is greatly appreciated.

(Django 2.0, Python 3.5)

aalberti333 · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-01 14:46:53Z

Ok, huge thanks to the Udemy course posted by Mark Winterbottom for the Django Rest Framework. I'll go ahead and leave this here for anybody else struggling with understanding some basic ideas in the Django Rest Framework.

JSON data is extracted by having the frontend hit urls determined by your api. So this becomes a question of "how do I implement some search functionality that's in a url?".

Django uses the Model, View, Controller pattern. A Model is what interacts with the database, and allows you to extract data from it without needing to understand how to query using actual SQL code (uses something called Object Relational Mapping to do this, or ORM, and your Models are in the model.py file). The Controller, how you interact with the pulled data to create/read/update/delete stuff in your api is saved in views.py (a bit counter intuitive, seeing as the View is what you would have in your templates folder [HTML pages and such]).

You can implement something called filters in your Controller (views.py) to allow you to search by specific information to get that ?search=whateveryouresearching url, by including the following:

from rest_framework import filters

and adding this to your ViewSet you want to search:

filter_backends = (filters.SearchFilter,) #allows for search functionality
search_fields = ('name','email') #which can be any Field in your viewset

This ?search=whateveryouresearching created by the filter is how some front end device will access specific searched information (such as a specific user input linke English or Mandarin inside 'language').

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