I am writing an app in which users will be able to store information that they can specify a REST interface for. IE, store a list of products at /<username>/rest/products. Since the URLs are obviously not known before hand, I was trying to think of the best way to implement dynamic URL creation in Flask. The first way I thought of would be to write a catch-all rule, and route the URL from there. But then I am basically duplicating URL routing capabilities when Flask already has them built-in. So, I was wondering if it would be a bad idea to use .add_url_rule() (docs here, scroll down a bit) to attach them directly to the app. Is there a specific reason this shouldn't be done?
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2 Answers
Every time you execute add_url_rule() the internal routing remaps the URL map. This is neither threadsafe nor fast. I right now don't understand why you need user specific URL rules to be honest. It kinda sounds like you actually want user specific applications mounted?
Maybe this is helpful: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/patterns/appdispatch/
3 Comments
kynan
I have the same requirement i.e. I'm looking for a way to dynamically add new endpoints to an API built with Eve using its
register_resource method, which calls add_url_rule internally. Note that this won't happen for every request, only triggered by a hook when a POST to a specific endpoint is received so performance should not be an issue.
cllamach
Exactly the same requirement here. Api, that needs adding and removing a new route whenever a PUT request happen at certain route. In my case i'm using flask-restful, but basically is the same.
pip
It seems I can do this in before_request if I use threading.lock, however, I'm not sure how to stop issues with url_for having the following error: ValueError: list modified during sort ERROR:app:Internal Server Error, list modified during sort
I have had similar requirement for my application where each endpoint /<SOMEID>/rest/other for given SOMEID should be bounded to a different function. One way to achieve this is keeping a lookup dictionary where values are the function that handle the specific SOMEID. For example take a look at this snippet:
func_look_up_dict = {...}
@app.route('<SOMEID>/rest/other', methods=['GET'])
def multiple_func_router_endpoint(SOMEID):
if SOMEID in func_look_up_dict.keys():
return jsonify({'result' = func_look_up_dict[SOMEID]()}), 200
else:
return jsonify({'result'='unknown', 'reason'='invalid id in url'}), 404
so for this care you don't really need to "dynamically" add url rules, but rather use a url rule with parameter and handle the various cases withing a single function. Another thing to consider is to really think about the use case of such URL endpoint. If <username> is a parameter that needs to be passed in, why not to use a url rule such as /rest/product/<username> or pass it in as an argument in the GET request?
Hope that helps.
