Content negotiation in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Content Negotiation in a REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API that returns user information. Different clients want the data in different formats, like JSON or XML.

🎯 Goal: Create a REST API endpoint that returns user data. Use content negotiation to send JSON if the client asks for 'application/json' and XML if the client asks for 'application/xml'.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called user with keys 'name' and 'age' and values 'Alice' and 30

Create a variable called accept_header with the value 'application/json' or 'application/xml'

Write an if statement to check if accept_header is 'application/json' or 'application/xml'

Print the user data as JSON if accept_header is 'application/json'

Print the user data as XML if accept_header is 'application/xml'

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

APIs often need to send data in different formats depending on what the client wants. Content negotiation helps decide the format automatically.

💼 Career

Understanding content negotiation is important for backend developers building APIs that work well with many clients and devices.

1

Create the user data dictionary

Create a dictionary called user with these exact entries: 'name': 'Alice' and 'age': 30

Rest API

# Create the user dictionary with name and age
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary. The keys are strings 'name' and 'age'. The values are 'Alice' and 30.

2

Set the Accept header variable

Create a variable called accept_header and set it to the string 'application/json'

Rest API

user = {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30}
# Create the accept_header variable with value 'application/json'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the string 'application/json' to the variable accept_header.

3

Write the content negotiation logic

Write an if statement that checks if accept_header is 'application/json' or 'application/xml'

Rest API

user = {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30}
accept_header = 'application/json'
# Write if statement to check accept_header value
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use if and elif to check the value of accept_header.

4

Print user data in the requested format

Inside the if block for 'application/json', print the user dictionary as JSON using json.dumps(user). Inside the elif block for 'application/xml', print the user dictionary as XML with tags <user>, <name>, and <age>. Import the json module at the top.

Rest API

import json

user = {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30}
accept_header = 'application/json'

if accept_header == 'application/json':
    # Print JSON string of user
    # Your code here
elif accept_header == 'application/xml':
    # Print XML string of user
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use json.dumps(user) to convert the dictionary to a JSON string. For XML, build a string with tags and values.