Sort direction (asc, desc) in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Sort Direction (asc, desc) in REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API that returns a list of products. Users can choose to get the products sorted by price in ascending or descending order.

🎯 Goal: Create a small Python program that simulates sorting product data by price in ascending or descending order based on a configuration variable.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called products with product names as keys and prices as values.

Create a variable called sort_direction that can be either 'asc' or 'desc'.

Use a sorting method that sorts the products by price according to the sort_direction.

Print the sorted list of product names and prices.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Sorting data by ascending or descending order is common in APIs that return lists of items, like products, users, or events.

💼 Career

Understanding how to control sort direction helps you build flexible APIs and user interfaces that show data in the order users want.

1

Create the product data

Create a dictionary called products with these exact entries: 'apple': 120, 'banana': 80, 'cherry': 150, 'date': 100.

Rest API

# Create the products dictionary with prices
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys and values separated by colons.

2

Set the sort direction

Create a variable called sort_direction and set it to the string 'asc' to sort prices in ascending order.

Rest API

products = {'apple': 120, 'banana': 80, 'cherry': 150, 'date': 100}
# Set sort_direction to 'asc'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'asc' to the variable sort_direction.

3

Sort the products by price

Create a variable called sorted_products that sorts the items of products by price. Use sort_direction to decide ascending or descending order. Use sorted(products.items(), key=lambda item: item[1], reverse=sort_direction == 'desc').

Rest API

products = {'apple': 120, 'banana': 80, 'cherry': 150, 'date': 100}
sort_direction = 'asc'
# Sort products by price using sort_direction
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the sorted() function with key=lambda item: item[1] to sort by price. Set reverse=True if sort_direction is 'desc'.

4

Print the sorted products

Print the sorted_products list to show the product names and prices in the chosen order using print(sorted_products).

Rest API

products = {'apple': 120, 'banana': 80, 'cherry': 150, 'date': 100}
sort_direction = 'asc'
sorted_products = sorted(products.items(), key=lambda item: item[1], reverse=sort_direction == 'desc')
# Print the sorted_products list
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print() to show the sorted list.