Graceful degradation in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Graceful Degradation in REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API for a weather service. Sometimes, the detailed weather data might not be available due to external service issues. You want your API to still respond with basic information instead of failing completely.

🎯 Goal: Create a REST API endpoint that tries to return detailed weather data. If detailed data is unavailable, it should gracefully degrade and return basic weather data instead.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called weather_data with keys 'temperature', 'humidity', and 'detailed_forecast' with exact values.

Create a boolean variable called is_detailed_available to simulate availability of detailed data.

Write a function called get_weather() that returns detailed data if available, otherwise returns basic data.

Print the result of calling get_weather().

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

APIs often depend on external services that may fail or be slow. Graceful degradation helps keep the API responsive by providing simpler data when full data is unavailable.

💼 Career

Understanding graceful degradation is important for backend developers and API designers to build reliable and user-friendly services.

1

DATA SETUP: Create the weather data dictionary

Create a dictionary called weather_data with these exact entries: 'temperature': 22, 'humidity': 60, and 'detailed_forecast': 'Sunny with light clouds'.

Rest API

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary and separate keys and values with colons.

2

CONFIGURATION: Add a flag for detailed data availability

Create a boolean variable called is_detailed_available and set it to False to simulate that detailed data is not available.

Rest API

weather_data = {
    'temperature': 22,
    'humidity': 60,
    'detailed_forecast': 'Sunny with light clouds'
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use False to indicate the detailed data is not available.

3

CORE LOGIC: Write the function to return weather data with graceful degradation

Write a function called get_weather() that returns a dictionary with 'temperature' and 'humidity' always. If is_detailed_available is True, include 'detailed_forecast' from weather_data in the returned dictionary. Otherwise, return only the basic data.

Rest API

weather_data = {
    'temperature': 22,
    'humidity': 60,
    'detailed_forecast': 'Sunny with light clouds'
}
is_detailed_available = False

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an if statement inside the function to check is_detailed_available and add the detailed forecast if true.

4

OUTPUT: Print the weather data returned by the function

Write a print statement to display the result of calling get_weather().

Rest API

weather_data = {
    'temperature': 22,
    'humidity': 60,
    'detailed_forecast': 'Sunny with light clouds'
}
is_detailed_available = False

def get_weather():
    basic_data = {
        'temperature': weather_data['temperature'],
        'humidity': weather_data['humidity']
    }
    if is_detailed_available:
        basic_data['detailed_forecast'] = weather_data['detailed_forecast']
    return basic_data

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call get_weather() inside print() to show the output.