Getting started with flask rest jsonapi

• flask-rest-jsonapi is an extension for Flask for quickly building rest APIs around the JSONAPI 1.0 specification
• Beside the basic requirements, the deciding factor for choosing this extension were support for :
  • Proper relationship definitions
  • Sorting
  • Filtering
  • Pagination
• The documentation can be found at http://flask-rest-jsonapi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
• The extension depends heavily upon marshmallow-jsonapi (docs) which in turn depends upon marshmallow (docs).
• Do not forget to refer marshmallow documentation in case of any difficulties, it will help a lot.
• As some modifications were required in the framework, and getting them merged in the original library may take some time, so the modified copy will be kept at https://github.com/shubham-padia/flask-rest-jsonapi/ for a very short amount of time.
• Do not hesitate to tinker with the code of flask-rest-jsonapi, in case of any difficulties, the source code will help you understand what is actually going on.
• For any new endpoint you define, make sure you add it here .

Some technical details not mentioned properly in the documentation:

• For every ResourceList, ResourceDetail and ResourceRelationship object, you can specify decorators,methods etc. in the following way

  class PersonList(ResourceDetail):
      schema = PersonSchema
      data_layer = {'session': db.session,
                    'model': Person}
      methods = ['GET', 'PATCH']
      decorators = (login_required, )
      get_schema_kwargs = {'only': ('name', )}

• Decorators in flask-rest-jsonapi follow certain conventions. View Decorators should have function as their parameter.
• Real example: the inbuilt jwt_required has been modified from

  def jwt_required(realm=None):
      """View decorator that requires a valid JWT token to be present in the request
      :param realm: an optional realm
      """
      def wrapper(fn):
          @wraps(fn)
          def decorator(*args, **kwargs):
              _jwt_required(realm or current_app.config['JWT_DEFAULT_REALM'])
              return fn(*args, **kwargs)
          return decorator
      return wrapper
  

  Refer here to

  def jwt_required(fn, realm=None):
      """
      Modified from original jwt_required to comply with `flask-rest-jsonapi` decorator conventions
      View decorator that requires a valid JWT token to be present in the request
      :param realm: an optional realm
      """
      @wraps(fn)
      def decorator(*args, **kwargs):
          _jwt_required(realm or current_app.config['JWT_DEFAULT_REALM'])
          return fn(*args, **kwargs)
      return decorator

  Refer here
• When defining the view names in the schema i.e self_view, self_view_many, etc. Make sure you prefix your blueprint name, e.g self_view = 'v1.user_detail', the framework will not do this automatically for you.
• Make sure you bookmark http://marshmallow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api_reference.html#module-marshmallow.fields , this will be a constant point of reference initially.