Cache-Control header directives in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Cache-Control Header Directives in REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API that returns user profile data. To improve performance and control how clients cache the responses, you need to add Cache-Control headers with specific directives.

🎯 Goal: Build a REST API endpoint that returns a JSON user profile and sets the Cache-Control header with the directive max-age=60 to tell clients to cache the response for 60 seconds.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called user_profile with keys id, name, and email and exact values 1, "Alice", and "[e-mail]" respectively.

Create a variable called cache_control_header and set it to the string "max-age=60".

Create a function called get_user_profile that returns a tuple with user_profile and a dictionary containing the Cache-Control header set to cache_control_header.

Print the result of calling get_user_profile().

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

APIs use Cache-Control headers to tell browsers and clients how long to keep data before asking again. This helps speed up apps and reduce server load.

💼 Career

Understanding HTTP headers like Cache-Control is important for backend developers, API designers, and anyone working with web services.

1

Create the user profile data

Create a dictionary called user_profile with these exact entries: 'id': 1, 'name': "Alice", and 'email': "[e-mail]".

Rest API

# Create the user_profile dictionary with id, name, and email
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with the exact keys and values.

2

Set the Cache-Control header directive

Create a variable called cache_control_header and set it to the string "max-age=60".

Rest API

user_profile = {'id': 1, 'name': "Alice", 'email': "[e-mail]"}
# Create cache_control_header with value "max-age=60"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact string "max-age=60" to the variable cache_control_header.

3

Create the API function with Cache-Control header

Create a function called get_user_profile that returns a tuple with user_profile and a dictionary containing the Cache-Control header set to cache_control_header.

Rest API

user_profile = {'id': 1, 'name': "Alice", 'email': "[e-mail]"}
cache_control_header = "max-age=60"
# Define get_user_profile() function returning user_profile and headers
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Define a function that returns a tuple: the user_profile dictionary and a headers dictionary with the Cache-Control key.

4

Print the API response

Print the result of calling get_user_profile().

Rest API

user_profile = {'id': 1, 'name': "Alice", 'email': "[e-mail]"}
cache_control_header = "max-age=60"

def get_user_profile():
    return user_profile, {'Cache-Control': cache_control_header}

# Print the result of get_user_profile()
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(get_user_profile()) to show the returned data and headers.