Flask-Classful 0.16.0

Installation

Install the latest extension with:

$ pip install flask-classful

Let’s see how it works

If you’re like me, you probably get a better idea of how to use something when you see it being used. Let’s go ahead and create a little app to see how Flask-Classful works:

from flask import Flask
from flask_classful import FlaskView

# we'll make a list to hold some quotes for our app
quotes = [
    "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man! ~ Jebediah Springfield",
    "If there is a way to do it better... find it. ~ Thomas Edison",
    "No one knows what he can do till he tries. ~ Publilius Syrus"
]

app = Flask(__name__)

class QuotesView(FlaskView):
    def index(self):
        return "<br>".join(quotes)

QuotesView.register(app)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

Run this app and open your web browser to: http://localhost:5000/quotes/

As you can see, it returns the list of quotes. But what if we just wanted one quote? What would we do then?

class QuotesView(FlaskView):
    def index(self):
        ...

    def get(self, id):
        id = int(id)
        if id < len(quotes):
            return quotes[id]
        else:
            return "Not Found", 404

Now direct your browser to: http://localhost:5000/quotes/1/ and you should see the very poignant quote from the esteemed Mr. Edison.

That’s cool and all, but what if we just wanted a random quote? What then? Let’s add a random view to our FlaskView:

from random import choice

class QuotesView(FlaskView):
    def index(self):
        ...

    def get(self, id):
        ...

    def random(self):
        return choice(quotes)

And point your browser to: http://localhost:5000/quotes/random/ and see that a random quote is returned each time. Voilà!

So by now you must be keenly aware of the fact that you have not defined a single route, but yet routing is obviously taking place. “Is this voodoo?” you ask?

Not at all. Flask-Classful will automatically create routes for any method in a FlaskView that doesn’t begin with an underscore character. You can still define your own routes of course, and we’ll look at that next.