Filtering by field values in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Filtering by field values

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API that returns a list of books. Users want to filter books by their genre.

🎯 Goal: Create a REST API endpoint that returns only books matching a given genre filter.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of books with exact fields and values

Add a variable to hold the genre filter

Filter the books list by the genre field using the filter variable

Return the filtered list as JSON output

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Filtering data by field values is common in APIs to let users get only the data they want.

💼 Career

Backend developers often write code to filter database or API data based on user requests.

1

Create the initial list of books

Create a list called books with these exact dictionaries: {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'genre': 'Fantasy'}, {'title': '1984', 'genre': 'Dystopian'}, {'title': 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'genre': 'Classic'}, {'title': 'The Great Gatsby', 'genre': 'Classic'}

Rest API

# Create the list of books with exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Make sure to create a list named books with dictionaries for each book as shown.

2

Add a genre filter variable

Create a variable called genre_filter and set it to the string 'Classic'

Rest API

books = [
    {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'genre': 'Fantasy'},
    {'title': '1984', 'genre': 'Dystopian'},
    {'title': 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'genre': 'Classic'},
    {'title': 'The Great Gatsby', 'genre': 'Classic'}
]
# Create a variable genre_filter and set it to 'Classic'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set genre_filter exactly to the string 'Classic'.

3

Filter the books by genre

Create a new list called filtered_books that contains only the books from books where the 'genre' field equals genre_filter

Rest API

books = [
    {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'genre': 'Fantasy'},
    {'title': '1984', 'genre': 'Dystopian'},
    {'title': 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'genre': 'Classic'},
    {'title': 'The Great Gatsby', 'genre': 'Classic'}
]
genre_filter = 'Classic'
# Create filtered_books list with books matching genre_filter
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list comprehension to filter books by comparing book['genre'] to genre_filter.

4

Print the filtered books as JSON

Import the json module and print the filtered_books list as a JSON string using json.dumps(filtered_books)

Rest API

books = [
    {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'genre': 'Fantasy'},
    {'title': '1984', 'genre': 'Dystopian'},
    {'title': 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'genre': 'Classic'},
    {'title': 'The Great Gatsby', 'genre': 'Classic'}
]
genre_filter = 'Classic'
filtered_books = [book for book in books if book['genre'] == genre_filter]
# Import json and print filtered_books as JSON
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use json.dumps to convert filtered_books to a JSON string and print it.