Updating records with Python 3 through API on Rails 4 application

Question

I'm working on a Rails 4 / mongoid application which needs to expose APIs for other applications and scripts. I need to be able to update documents in one of the models through an API with Python 3 script. I'm a bit fresh with Python hence asking for help here.

I already found out how to query Rails APIs with Python 3 and urllib but struggling with updates. I was trying to go through Python 3.5 docs for urllib2 but struggling to apply this to my script.

What goes to data and how to add authentication token to headers, which in curl would look something like this

-H 'Authorization:Token token="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"'
-X POST -d "name=A60E001&status=changed"

I would greatly appreciate if somebody explained how to, for example, update status based on name (name is not unique yet but will be). My biggest challenge is the Python side. Once I have the data in params on Rails side I think I can handle it. I think.

I included my model and update action from the controller below.

app/models/experiment.rb

class Experiment
  include Mongoid::Document
  include Mongoid::Timestamps

  field :name, type: String
  field :status, type:String
end

app/controllers/api/v1/experiments_controller.rb

module Api
  module V1
    class ExperimentsController < ActionController::Base
      before_filter :restrict_access

      ...

      def update
        respond_to do |format|
          if @expt_proc.update(expt_proc_params)
            format.json { render :show, status: :ok, location: @expt_proc }
         else
            format.json { render json: @expt_proc.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
          end
        end
      end

      ...

    private
      def restrict_access
        authenticate_or_request_with_http_token do |token, options|
          ApiKey.where(access_token: token).exists?
        end
      end
    ...

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

I figured out who to send a PATCH request with Python 3 and update the the record's status by name.

Thanks to this post found out about requests module. I used requests.patch to update the record and it works great.

python code

import requests
import json

url = 'http://0.0.0.0:3000/api/v1/update_expt_queue.json'
payload = {'expt_name' : 'myExperiment1', 'status' : 'finished' }

r = requests.patch(url, payload)

There are two problems remaining:

How to add headers to this request which would allow me to go through token based authentication. At the moment it's disabled. request.patch only takes 2 parameters, it doesn't take headers parameter.
How to access the JSON which is sent in response by Rails API.

Updating records with Python 3 through API on Rails 4 application

1 Answers1