Media¶
Falcon allows for easy and customizable internet media type handling. By default
Falcon only enables a single JSON handler. However, additional handlers
can be configured through the falcon.RequestOptions
and
falcon.ResponseOptions
objects specified on your falcon.API
.
Note
To avoid unnecessary overhead, Falcon will only process request media the first time the media property is referenced. Once it has been referenced, it’ll use the cached result for subsequent interactions.
Usage¶
Zero configuration is needed if you’re creating a JSON API. Just access
or set the media
attribute as appropriate and let Falcon do the heavy
lifting for you.
import falcon
class EchoResource(object):
def on_post(self, req, resp):
message = req.media.get('message')
resp.media = {'message': message}
resp.status = falcon.HTTP_200
Warning
Once media is called on a request, it’ll consume the request’s stream.
Validating Media¶
Falcon currently only provides a JSON Schema media validator; however, JSON Schema is very versatile and can be used to validate any deserialized media type that JSON also supports (i.e. dicts, lists, etc).
-
falcon.media.validators.jsonschema.
validate
(schema)[source]¶ Decorator that validates
req.media
using JSON SchemaParameters: schema (dict) – A dictionary that follows the JSON Schema specification. See json-schema.org for more information on defining a compatible dictionary. Example
from falcon.media.validators import jsonschema # -- snip -- @jsonschema.validate(my_post_schema) def on_post(self, req, resp): # -- snip --
Note
This validator requires the
jsonschema
library available via PyPI. The library also requires Python 2.7+.
If JSON Schema does not meet your needs, a custom validator may be implemented in a similar manner to the one above.
Content-Type Negotiation¶
Falcon currently only supports partial negotiation out of the box. By default,
when the media
attribute is used it attempts to de/serialize based on the
Content-Type
header value. The missing link that Falcon doesn’t provide
is the connection between the falcon.Request
Accept
header provided
by a user and the falcon.Response
Content-Type
header.
If you do need full negotiation, it is very easy to bridge the gap using middleware. Here is an example of how this can be done:
class NegotiationMiddleware(object):
def process_request(self, req, resp):
resp.content_type = req.accept
Replacing the Default Handlers¶
When creating your API object you can either add or completely
replace all of the handlers. For example, lets say you want to write an API
that sends and receives MessagePack. We can easily do this by telling our
Falcon API that we want a default media-type of application/msgpack
and
then create a new Handlers
object specifying the desired media type and
a handler that can process that data.
import falcon
from falcon import media
handlers = media.Handlers({
'application/msgpack': media.MessagePackHandler(),
})
api = falcon.API(media_type='application/msgpack')
api.req_options.media_handlers = handlers
api.resp_options.media_handlers = handlers
Alternatively, if you would like to add an additional handler such as MessagePack, this can be easily done in the following manner:
import falcon
from falcon import media
extra_handlers = {
'application/msgpack': media.MessagePackHandler(),
}
api = falcon.API()
api.req_options.media_handlers.update(extra_handlers)
api.resp_options.media_handlers.update(extra_handlers)
Supported Handler Types¶
Custom Handler Type¶
If Falcon doesn’t have an internet media type handler that supports your use case, you can easily implement your own using the abstract base class provided by Falcon:
-
class
falcon.media.
BaseHandler
[source]¶ Abstract Base Class for an internet media type handler
-
serialize
(obj)[source]¶ Serialize the media object on a
falcon.Response
Parameters: obj (object) – A serializable object. Returns: The resulting serialized bytes from the input object. Return type: bytes
-
deserialize
(raw)[source]¶ Deserialize the
falcon.Request
body.Parameters: raw (bytes) – Input bytes to deserialize Returns: A deserialized object. Return type: object
-
Handlers¶
Media Type Constants¶
The falcon
module provides a number of constants for
common media types, including the following:
falcon.MEDIA_JSON
falcon.MEDIA_MSGPACK
falcon.MEDIA_YAML
falcon.MEDIA_XML
falcon.MEDIA_HTML
falcon.MEDIA_JS
falcon.MEDIA_TEXT
falcon.MEDIA_JPEG
falcon.MEDIA_PNG
falcon.MEDIA_GIF