The central feature that distinguishes the REST architectural style from other network-based styles is its emphasis on a uniform interface between components.
— Roy Fielding,Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures
As a rule, it's probably better practice to return absolute URIs from your Web APIs, such ashttp://example.com/foobar, rather than returning relative URIs, such as/foobar.
The advantages of doing so are:
REST framework provides two utility functions to make it more simple to return absolute URIs from your Web API.
There's no requirement for you to use them, but if you do then the self-describing API will be able to automatically hyperlink its output for you, which makes browsing the API much easier.
Signature:reverse(viewname, *args, **kwargs)
Has the same behavior asdjango.urls.reverse, except that it returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.
You shouldinclude the request as a keyword argument to the function, for example:
from rest_framework.reverse import reversefrom rest_framework.views import APIViewfrom django.utils.timezone import nowclass APIRootView(APIView): def get(self, request): year = now().year data = { ... 'year-summary-url': reverse('year-summary', args=[year], request=request) } return Response(data)Signature:reverse_lazy(viewname, *args, **kwargs)
Has the same behavior asdjango.urls.reverse_lazy, except that it returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.
As with thereverse function, you shouldinclude the request as a keyword argument to the function, for example:
api_root = reverse_lazy('api-root', request=request)