"API Client" Exercise

Prerequisites

• APIs

• "Web Requests" Exercise

Business Prompt

In previous "grocery store" exercises, we have been processing grocery product data from a local CSV file. This allowed managers at different locations to keep their own inventory of products. But to improve consistency of record-keeping across stores, the store owner now wants managers at all stores to share the same inventory of products.

As a lead developer on your team, the professor has deployed the "Groceries API" web service to a public server available at https://groceries-api-csv.herokuapp.com. He explains, each store can use its own "API Client" application to issue HTTP requests to the API, and the API will perform the corresponding operations on a shared CSV inventory of products stored on the server.

Objective

Your objective is to write a command-line Python application that will allow users in any store to create, read, update, and destroy products from this shared inventory.

Challenges

First, read the API Documentation, which describes how to make requests to perform certain CRUD operations.

NOTE: You'll see some curl examples in there, but that is a command-line utility, and there aren't actually any Python code examples in there. The parts of the documentation you should focus on for each operation are: "what kind of request do I need to make?" (e.g. GET, POST, etc.), and "which URL do I make the request to?"

After consulting the docs, issue an appropriate HTTP request in Python to satisfy each of the challenges below.

List Products

API Documentation: List Products

Request information about all products, then loop through and print the "id" and "name" of each.

Show a Product

API Documentation: Show Product

Choose a product identifier from the list, then request information about that specific product, then print all the product's attributes.

Destroy a Product

API Documentation: Destroy Product

Request to delete the previously-selected product from the inventory.

Create a new Product

API Documentation: Create Product

Request to create a new product in the inventory.

Update a Product

API Documentation: Update Product

Request to update the new product you recently created.

Solutions