me-gusta / qapi_template

Query API Template

What

This is a tool for exploring behavior of web services and prototyping. It allows us to simplify the design of web services, in situations when we don't know in advance which data structures will be used.

It allows you to quickly add, delete and edit existing functionality without rewriting the code.

Why

1. Since we do not have models like they introduced sqlalchemy, we don't need to think about data stored in the database, we create required models on the fly.
2. When we use pymongo + (pydatic or dataclasses) in constantly shifting environment, 90% of our code consist of Optional parameters. It's not always clear what we are working with.
3. And if we use dictionaries, there is a high probability of making a typo.

Current State

So far it has been used only to create static websites and work with jinja templates. This template shows how QueryAPI can be implemented for static site generation.

Requirements

• Flask
• mongodb
• markdown

Generate dummy data

pip install -r requirements.txt
python /website/help_scripts/1_generate_dummy_entities.py

For storing articles content we use markdown and .md files are located in /content

Admin page is built with Svelte. It allows us to work with data in a spreadsheet. It's available on DOMAIN/qapi/admin

How it works

For example, if there is an entity "Article", then it will have the following components:

tag: str
title: str
description: str

Since this article is rendered into a template, we can make html blocks that will change for different articles.

block_nav # 'big' or 'small'
block_banner # 'image' or 'none'

So we can examine this entity in two different perspectives, while maintaining its integrity as a one thing.

article = query_one(title, description, tag='initial')

blocks = query_one(block_nav, block_banner)

Some articles may have their unique template or path, if so we can add such components.

template: str
path: str

In this case block_nav and block_banner above will not be used, but we do not need to rewrite anything and deal with child-parent relationships, etc.

all_with_template = query(template)