Eve: Building RESTful APIs with MongoDB and Flask Transcripts
Chapter: Fine-tuning your REST service
Lecture: HATEOAS
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0:00
Hypermedia as the engine of application state
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or as it is known— HATEOAS
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is enabled by default on the framework.
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So each get response includes a links section,
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links provide details on their relation
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relative to the resource being accessed and a title.
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Relations and titles can then be used by clients
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to dynamically update their UI
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or to navigate the API without knowing its structure beforehand.
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Hyper media as the engine of application state is a nice feature
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it is included in the Rest principles and by default,
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the Eve framework supports it,
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but to be honest, I've not seen so many clients make use of this feature
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and also many Rest services are not providing it.
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So you have the option to turn it off if you want to
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let's go and first look at the typical output you get from a get request.
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Let's close the items array and here it is our links section,
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we don't want these, let's see how we turn it off.
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By now you probably already imagine what's going to happen.
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I've just set HATEOAS to false. Save, relaunch.
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And send a request again
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we're still getting the items array, the meta tag is still there
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but there's no links section
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so we have disabled the feature completely,
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let's go to a single document endpoint,
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no links section here neither.
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Now, if we want the feature on
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but we want to change the key used in the Json for this feature,
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we can do that very easily
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we just need go back, enable the feature
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then set links equal to whatever value we want to use as the key for the feature.
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So here we're using links, but without the underscore
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let's restart the server, and see what happens
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bam, feature is back on but this time
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we have customized the key used for the feature.
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We can also check the people endpoint,
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links is there without the underscore and the feature is back.
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It is worth noting that when you disable the feature,
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you're also losing the pagination feature because as you know,
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pagination links are included within the links section.
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This is probably worth considering
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you get a nice performance boost because you aren't doing any pagination.
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You don't have any links section,
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but you are also losing some valuable information for your clients.
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Finally, keep in mind that you can also
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switch the feature on and off at a local level,
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so here we have the feature on globally,
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but we can go to the people endpoint for example,
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and set it to off, if we don't want it at this endpoint.
