Flask Delicious Tutorial : Building a Library Management System Part 4 - Focus on Responses

Previous: Part 3: Routes

This post is a reference for what you need to return / flask responses. Feel free to come back again. I have configured all in this repo:

DeliciousFlask-4.1

Download and run app.py, see Part2 for in the series if you are a beginner in Python. It's a post i wish i had when i started Flask.

In the repo there are different kinds of returns, let's begin by returning a string.

Returning Strings

Going to http://127.0.0.1:5000/ gives us home as configured here:

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return 'home'

Returning Integers

@app.route('/return-int')
def return_int():
    return 1

Going to http://127.0.0.1:5000/return-int gives us:

as it is not possible to return integers. The whole error line says

TypeError: The view function did not return a valid response. The return type must be a string, dict, tuple, Response instance, or WSGI callable, but it was a int.

So, you know what to return.

Returning Json

In Python, dictionaries were purposely designed to imitate JSON for easy transfer of formats. We use jsonify to convert a dictionary to JSON response.

@app.route('/return-json')
def return_json():
    data = {
        'name': 'Umar',
        'address': 'Port Louis, Mauritius',
        'age': 15,
        'has_pass': True
    }
    return jsonify(data)

Going to http://127.0.0.1:5000/return-json gives us:

Note that the True returned became the JavaScript true, our integer of 15 turned into a JavaScript integer and our String became a JavaScript string though it looks the same. JSON means JavaScript Object Notation.

Returing HTML

When returning a string you actually return HTML strings.

@app.route('/return-html')
def return_html():
    return '<h1>I am a BIG header enclosed in a h1 tag</h1>'

Going to http://127.0.0.1:5000/return-html gives us:

But of course it is not convenient to return whole files.

Let's see how to return files

Return Files

@app.route('/return-file')
def return_file():
    return render_template('index.html')

Going to http://127.0.0.1:5000/return-html gives us a blank page ... Try putting some html in the index file found in the templates folder. Flask searches for files in a folder named templates by default.

Redirect

@app.route('/redirect-home')
def return_redirect():
    return redirect('/')

Going to http://127.0.0.1:5000/redirect-home redirects to http://127.0.0.1:5000/

Redirect to function

@app.route('/redirect-function-html')
def return_redirect_function():
    return redirect(url_for('return_html'))

Going to http://127.0.0.1:5000/redirect-function-html redirects to http://127.0.0.1:5000/return-html

url_for searches for the function and returns the response

Redirect in case of blueprints

Though we'll cover blueprints later on, including this one here to serve as a reference

Let's say you have a blueprint named book. You want to redirect to the function named index. You do it like this:

return redirect(url_for('book.index'))

Hope you liked this summary sheet! Stay tuned for the next part!

My mail if you did not understand something: arj.python at gmail dot com

You have anything you'd want to see in this series? Tell me below!