Django: return query result as api

Question

I'm trying to build an API server using Django. I have a few tables and I need to run queries based on the parameters passed in by url:

http://server.com/api/request/p1=123&p2=321...

and the server would extract p1 and p2 from url and run queries using them, and then return the result in json or xml.

I have tried Tastypie, and it's very easy to set up for retrieving data from one model. But my case is a bit complicated than that, and sometimes I need to run spatial queries. So if I could run the query and return result as json/xml, it would be great!

Very new to the backend technology, any help for a start point is appreciated!

Thanks!

[Edit] Just want to make my case clearer. Say I ran a raw query using qs = cursor.execute(sql), etc., and I want to return that result as json/xml to a api call. Can I do that with either Tastypie or Rest Framework? Or can I do it without any help from 3rd party framework?

Answer 1

Here's a view I use return json, you should be able to adapt it pretty easy:

import json
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
from .models import *

def response_times(request):
    response_data = {}  #Create an empty dictionary
    websites = Website.objects.all()  #Query your models
    for site in websites:  
        key = slugify(site.name)
        response_data[key] = {}
        history = History.objects.filter(website=site)[:60]
        response_data[key]['response_times'] = []
        for response in history:
            response_data[key]['response_times'].append({'time': str(response.time), 'timestamp': response.added.strftime('%s')}) 
    return HttpResponse(json.dumps(response_data), content_type="application/json")

Answer 2

It seems you have in the result QuerySet of some Model instances. So you could specify serializer to work with your model and use it to serialize from model instances to native python data using Rest Framework. Look here for details.