Hierarchical resource paths in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Hierarchical Resource Paths in REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API for a library system. The system has books and each book has chapters. You want to create hierarchical resource paths to access chapters of specific books.

🎯 Goal: Build a REST API with hierarchical resource paths to get chapters of a specific book using URL paths like /books/{book_id}/chapters/{chapter_id}.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called library with books and their chapters

Create a variable called book_id to select a specific book

Use a hierarchical path string to access a chapter of the selected book

Print the chapter title using the hierarchical resource path

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Hierarchical resource paths are used in REST APIs to organize and access nested resources like books and chapters.

💼 Career

Understanding hierarchical paths helps in designing clear and scalable APIs for web services.

1

Create the library data structure

Create a dictionary called library with these exact entries: "book1" with chapters {"chapter1": "Introduction", "chapter2": "Basics"} and "book2" with chapters {"chapter1": "Getting Started", "chapter2": "Advanced Topics"}.

Rest API

# Create the library dictionary with books and chapters
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Think of library as a dictionary where each book ID maps to another dictionary of chapters.

2

Select a book using a variable

Create a variable called book_id and set it to the string "book1" to select the first book.

Rest API

library = {
    "book1": {"chapter1": "Introduction", "chapter2": "Basics"},
    "book2": {"chapter1": "Getting Started", "chapter2": "Advanced Topics"}
}
# Create a variable book_id and set it to "book1"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple string variable to hold the book ID.

3

Access a chapter using hierarchical resource path

Create a variable called chapter_title that accesses the chapter with key "chapter2" inside the book selected by book_id from the library dictionary.

Rest API

library = {
    "book1": {"chapter1": "Introduction", "chapter2": "Basics"},
    "book2": {"chapter1": "Getting Started", "chapter2": "Advanced Topics"}
}
book_id = "book1"
# Access chapter2 title of the selected book and assign it to chapter_title
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use two square brackets to access nested dictionaries: first for book, second for chapter.

4

Print the chapter title

Write a print statement to display the value of chapter_title.

Rest API

library = {
    "book1": {"chapter1": "Introduction", "chapter2": "Basics"},
    "book2": {"chapter1": "Getting Started", "chapter2": "Advanced Topics"}
}
book_id = "book1"
chapter_title = library[book_id]["chapter2"]
# Print the chapter_title
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print() to show the chapter title on the screen.