Eve: Building RESTful APIs with MongoDB and Flask Transcripts
Chapter: Your first Eve service
Lecture: Enabling writes
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0:00
Now that we're connected to an actual database,
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we want to start writing to it.
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So let's go back to our Postman client, we switch to a post request
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to the people endpoint and we want to add the app payload to our request
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so let's go to the body tab and switch to application Json.
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Notice, as we switch to Json a new header has been added for us,
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so the content type with this request
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is going to be application Json.
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Now, all we need to do is add our body,
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Let's add a simple document with just one field, first name, John.
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When we hit send, what we get back from our API is an error.
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Method not allowed. This is actually expected because by default,
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Eve APIs are read only, and this is done to protect your data of course.
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If you want to allow write operation on your database,
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you have to explicitly opt in.
1:03
So let's. see how it's done.
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Back to our client, we go and as you might imagine,
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what we need to do is add a new keyword here, resource, methods.
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So which are the methods that are supported at every endpoint
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or resource in Eve terms.
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This is a list and the default is just
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a simple string with a get command.
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If you want to add support for write operation,
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we add post command, and if we want to support the deletion,
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we go with the delete command.
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So let's save these and restart our server.
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So now we are going to support not only read operations,
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but also write operation and delete operation.
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Let's go back to our client and try our request again.
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We're still getting an error but it has changed.
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Now we're getting an unprocessable entity.
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Now, this means that the write operation has been attempted,
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but there was some kind of error,
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and if we inspect the payload,
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we see that we are getting a new keyword, a new meta keyword,
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and it is issues, this is a document,
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and it contains the list of errors,
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as we can see, the problem here is
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that the first name field is unknown,
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this is because, again, even if Mongo is a schemaless
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and you can write anything to Mongo,
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that doesn't mean that you really want to allow
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any kind of document and field
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to be stored on your database.
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Most of the time you want your documents to be validated,
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and you want them to match some kind of schema.
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This is the reason why Eve doesn't allow you
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to write unknown fields to your database.
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We will see that there is an option to allow unknown documents,
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but by default, that's not possible.
3:05
What we need to do now is define a schema for our endpoint.
