Discount Codes in Open Event Server

The Open Event System allows usage of discount codes with tickets and events. This blogpost describes what types of discount codes are present and what endpoints can be used to fetch and update details.

In Open Event API Server, each event can have two types of discount codes. One is ‘event’ discount code, while the other is ‘ticket’ discount code. As the name suggests, the event discount code is an event level discount code and the ticket discount code is ticket level.

Now each event can have only one ‘event’ discount code and is accessible only to the server admin. The Open Event server admin can create, view and update the ‘event’ discount code for an event. The event discount code followsDiscountCodeEvent Schema. This schema is inherited from the parent class DiscountCodeSchemaPublic. To save the unique discount code associated with an event, the event model’s discount_code_id field is used.

The ‘ticket’ discount is accessible by the event organizer and co-organizer. Each event can have any number of ‘ticket’ discount codes. This follows the DiscountCodeTicket schema, which is also inherited from the same base class ofDiscountCodeSchemaPublic. The use of the schema is decided based on the value of the field ‘used_for’ which can have the value either ‘events’ or ‘tickets’. Both the schemas have different relationships with events and marketer respectively.

We have the following endpoints for Discount Code events and tickets:
‘/events/<int:event_id>/discount-code’
‘/events/<int:event_id>/discount-codes’

The first endpoint is based on the DiscountCodeDetail class. It returns the detail of one discount code which in this case is the event discount code associated with the event.

The second endpoint is based on the DiscountCodeList class which returns a list of discount codes associated with an event. Note that this list also includes the ‘event’ discount code, apart from all the ticket discount codes.

class DiscountCodeFactory(factory.alchemy.SQLAlchemyModelFactory):
   class Meta:
       model = DiscountCode
       sqlalchemy_session = db.session
event_id = None
user = factory.RelatedFactory(UserFactory)
user_id = 1


Since each discount code belongs to an event(either directly or through the ticket), the factory for this has event as related factory, but to check for 
/events/<int:event_id>/discount-code endpoint we first need the event and then pass the discount code id to be 1 for dredd to check this. Hence, event is not included as a related factory, but added as a different object every time a discount code object is to be used.

@hooks.before("Discount Codes > Get Discount Code Detail of an Event > Get Discount Code Detail of an Event")
def event_discount_code_get_detail(transaction):
   """
   GET /events/1/discount-code
   :param transaction:
   :return:
   """
   with stash['app'].app_context():
       discount_code = DiscountCodeFactory()
       db.session.add(discount_code)
       db.session.commit()
       event = EventFactoryBasic(discount_code_id=1)
       db.session.add(event)
       db.session.commit()


The other tests and extended documentation can be found 
here.

References:

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Stripe Authorization In Open Event API Server

The Open Event System supports payments through stripe. Stripe is a suite of APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes. This blogpost covers testing of Stripe Authorization Schema and endpoints in the API Server.

The Stripe Authorization class provides the following endpoints:

'/stripe-authorization'
'/stripe-authorization/<int:id>'
'/events/<int:event_id>/stripe-authorization'
'/events/<event_identifier>/stripe-authorization'


In the pull request made for adding documentation and tests, these two endpoints were removed:

'stripe_authorization_list',
'/events/<int:event_id>/stripe-authorization',
'/events/<event_identifier>/stripe-authorization'

This is because each event can have only one stripe authorization, so there can not exist a list of stripe authorization objects related to an event.

The ‘stripe_authorization_list’ endpoint is made POST only. This is because Open Event does not allow individual resources’ list to be accessible. Since, there is no endpoint which returns a list of Stripe Authorizations the StripeAuthorizationList(ResourceListis removed.

The ResourceDetail class was modified to add a query to support  results from ‘/events/<int:event_id>/stripe-authorization’ endpoint suThe view_kwargs for the detail endpoint has to contain the resource id, so event_id from view_kwags is used to get the id for stripe authorization.

stripe_authorization = self.session.query(StripeAuthorization).filter_by(event_id=view_kwargs['event_id']).one()
view_kwargs['id'] = stripe_authorization.id

Writing Test for Documentation

(Tests for the /events/1/stripe-authorization  is described here, for others please refer to links in additional references.)

To test the  /events/1/stripe-authorization endpoint for GET, we first insert a Stripe Authorization object into the database which will then be retrieved by the GET request and then compared with the expected response body from the documentation file.

Since stripe-auth has a required relationship with event class, an event must also exist for strie auth object to be created. The event is also required because the endpoint ‘events/’ expects an event object to exist. The StripeAuthorizationFactory takes care of this with event as a RelatedFactory. So when a StripeAuthorization object is inserted, an event is created first and passed as the required relationship to stripe_list_post endpoint.

The event is related to the stripe object by setting event_id = 1 in the factory.

Adding the pre-test hook for GET:

@hooks.before("StripeAuthorization > Stripe Authorization for an Event > Get Stripe Authorization Details of an Event")
def event_stripe_authorization_get_detail(transaction):
   """
   GET /events/1/stripe-authorization
   :param transaction:
   :return:
   """
   with stash['app'].app_context():
       stripe = StripeAuthorizationFactory()
       db.session.add(stripe)
       db.session.commit()


The expected response for this request can be found
 here.

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Implemeting Permissions for Speakers API in Open Event API Server

In my previous blogpost I talked about what the permissions enlisted in developer handbook means and which part of the codebase defines what part of the permissions clauses. The permission manager provides the permissions framework to implement the permissions and proper access controls based on the dev handbook.

In this blogpost, the actual implementation of the permissions is described. (Speakers API is under consideration here). The following table is the permissions in the developer handbook.

List

View

Create

Update

Delete

Superadmin/admin

Event organizer

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

Registered User

✓ [3]

✓ [3]

✓ [4]

✓ [3]

✓ [3]

Everyone else

✓ [2][4]

✓ [2][4]

  1. Only self-owned events
  2. Only of sessions with state approved or accepted
  3. Only of self-submitted sessions
  4. Only to events with state published.

Super admin and admin should be able to access all the methods – list, view, create, update and delete. All the permissions are implemented through functions derived from permissions manager.Since all the functions have first check for super admin and admin, these are automatically taken care of.

Only of self-submitted sessions
This means that a registered user can list, view, edit or delete speakers of a session which he himself submitted. This requires adding a ‘creator’ attribute to session object which will help us determine if the session was created by the user. So before making a post for sessions, the current user identity is included as part of the payload.

def before_post(self, args, kwargs, data):
   data['creator_id'] = current_identity.id


Now that we have added creator id to a session, a method is used to check if session was created by the same user.

def is_session_self_submitted(view, view_args, view_kwargs, *args, **kwargs):
    user = current_identity


Firstly the current identity is set as user which will later be used to check id. Sequentially, admin, superadmin, organizer and co-organizers are checked. After this a session is fetched using 
kwargs[session_id]. Then if the current user id is same as the creator id of the session fetched, access is granted, else Forbidden Error is returned.

if session.creator_id == user.id:
   return view(*view_args, **view_kwargs)


In the before_post method of speakers class, the session ids received in the data are passed to this function in 
kwargs as session_id. The permissions are then checked there using current user. If the session id are not those of self submitted sessions, ‘Session Not Found’ is returned.

 if not has_access('is_session_self_submitted', session_id=session_id):
                    raise ObjectNotFound({'parameter': 'session_id'},
                                         "Session: {} not found".format(session_id))


Only of sessions with state approved or accepted
This check is required for user who has not submitted the session himself, so he can only see speaker profiles of accepted sessions. First, if the user is not authenticated, permissions are not checked. If co-organizer access is available, then the user can see all the speakers, so for this case filtering is not done. If not, then ‘is_session_self_submitted’ is checked. If yes, then then again no filtering, but if not then the following query filters accepted sessions.

if not has_access('is_session_self_submitted', session_id=session.id):
    query_ = query_.filter(Session.state == "approved" or Session.state == "accepted")

Similarly all the permissions first generate a list of all objects and then filtering is done based on the access level, instead of getting the list based on permissions.

Only to events with state published
It is necessary that users except the organizers and co-organizers can not see the events which are in draft state. The same thing follows for speaker profiles – a user cannot submit or view a speaker profile to an unpublished event. Hence, this constraint. So before POST of speakers, if event is not published, an event not found error is returned.

if event.state == "draft":
    raise ObjectNotFound({'parameter': 'event_id'},
                        "Event: {} not found".format(data['event_id'])


For GET, the  implementation of this is similar to the previous permission. A basic query is generated as such:

query_ = query_.join(Event).filter(Event.id == event.id)


Now if the user does not have at least 
co-organizer access, draft events must be filtered out.

if not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=event.id):
    query_ = query_.filter(Event.state == "published")


Some of the finer details have been skipped here, which can be found in the 
code.

Resources

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Understanding Permissions for Various APIs in Open Event API Server

Since the Open Event Server has various elements, a proper permissions system is essential. This huge list of permissions is well compiled in the developer handbook which can be found here. In this blogpost, permissions listed in the developer handbook are discussed. Let’s start with what we wish to achieve, that is, how to make sense of these permissions and where does each clause fit in the API Server’s codebase.

For example, Sponsors API has the following permissions.

List

View

Create

Update

Delete

Superadmin/admin

Event organizer

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

✓ [1]

Registered User

✓ [3]

✓ [3]

✓ [4]

✓ [3]

✓ [3]

Everyone else

✓ [2][4]

✓ [2][4]

  1. Only self-owned events
  2. Only sessions with state approved or accepted
  3. Only self-submitted sessions
  4. Only to events with state published.

Based on flask-rest-jsonapi resource manager, we get list create under ResourceList through ResourceList’s GET and POST methods, whereas View, Update, Delete work on single objects and hence are provided by ResourceDetail’s GET, PATCH and DELETE respectively. Each function of the permission manager has a jwt_required decorator.

@jwt_required
def is_super_admin(view, view_args, view_kwargs, *args, **kwargs):

@jwt_required
def is_session_self_submitted(view, view_args, view_kwargs, *args, **kwargs):


This
 ensures that whenever a check for access control is made to the permission manager, the user is signed in to Open Event. Additionally, the permissions are written in a hierarchical way such that for every permission, first the useris checked for admin or super admin, then for other accesses. Similar hierarchy is kept for organizer accesses like track organizer, registrar, staff or organizer and coorganizer.

Some APIs resources require no authentication for List. To do this we need to add a check for Authentication token in the headers. Since each of the functions of permission manager have jwt_required as decorator, it is important to checkfor the presence of JWT token in request headers, because we can proceed to check for specific permissions in that case only.

if 'Authorizationin request.headers:
 _jwt_required(current_app.config['JWT_DEFAULT_REALM'])


Since the resources are created by endpoints of the form : 
‘/v1/<resource>/` , this is derived from the separate ResourceListPost class. This class is POST only and has a before_create object method where the required relationships and permissions are checked before inserting the data in the tables. In the before_create method, let’s say that event is a required relationship, which will be defined by the ResourceRelationRequired , then we use our custom method

def require_relationship(resource_list, data):
    for resource in resource_list:
        if resource not in data:
            raise UnprocessableEntity({'pointer': '/data/relationships/{}'.format(resource)},
                                      "A valid relationship with {} resource is required".format(resource))


to check if the required relationships are present in the data. The event_id here can also be used to check for organizer or co-organizer access in the permissions manager for a particular event.

Here’s another permissions structure for a different API – Settings.

List

View

Create

Update

Delete

Superadmin/admin

Everyone else

✓ [1]

  1. Only app_nametaglineanalytics_keystripe_publishable_keygoogle_urlgithub_urltwitter_urlsupport_urlfacebook_urlyoutube_urlandroid_app_urlweb_app_url fields .

This API does not allow access to the complete object, but to only some fields which are listed above. The complete details can be checked here.

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Using Custom Forms In Open Event API Server

One feature of the  Open Event management system is the ability to add a custom form for an event. The nextgen API Server exposes endpoints to view, edit and delete forms and form-fields. This blogpost describes how to use a custom-form in Open Event API Server.

Custom forms allow the event organizer to make a personalized forms for his/her event. The form object includes an identifier set by the user, and the form itself in the form of a string. The user can also set the type for the form which can be either of text or checkbox depending on the user needs. There are other fields as well, which are abstracted. These fields include:

  • id : auto generated unique identifier for the form
  • event_id : id of the event with which the form is associated
  • is_required : If the form is required
  • is_included : if the form is to be included
  • is_fixed : if the form is fixedThe last three of these fields are boolean fields and provide the user with better control over forms use-cases in the event management.

Only the event organizer has permissions to edit or delete these forms, while any user who is logged in to eventyay.com can see the fields available for a custom form for an event.

To create a custom-form for event with id=1, the following request is to be made:
POST  https://api.eventyay.com/v1/events/1/custom-forms?sort=type&filter=[]

with all the above described fields to be included in the request body.  For example:

{
 "data": {
   "type": "custom_form",
   "attributes": {
     "form": "form",
     "type": "text",
     "field-identifier": "abc123",
     "is-required": "true",
     "is-included": "false",
     "is-fixed": "false"
   }
 }
}

The API returns the custom form object along with the event relationships and other self and related links. To see what the response looks like exactly, please check the sample here.

Now that we have created a form, any user can get the fields for the same. But let’s say that the event organiser wants to update some field or some other attribute for the form, he can make the following request along with the custom-form id.

PATCH https://api.eventyay.com/v1/custom-forms/1

(Note: custom-form id must be included in both the URL as well as request body)

Similarly, to delete the form,
DELETE https://api.eventyay.com/v1/custom-forms/1     can be used.

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Writing Dredd Test for Event Topic-Event Endpoint in Open Event API Server

The API Server exposes a large set of endpoints which are well documented using apiary’s API Blueprint. Ton ensure that these documentations describe exactly what the API does, as in the response made to a request, testing them is crucial. This testing is done through Dredd Documentation testing with the help of FactoryBoy for faking objects.

In this blogpost I describe how to use FactoryBoy to write Dredd tests for the Event Topic- Event endpoint of Open Event API Server.

The endpoint for which tests are described here is this: For testing this endpoint, we need to simulate the API GET request by making a call to our database and then compare the response received to the expected response written in the api_blueprint.apib file. For GET to return some data we need to insert an event with some event topic in the database.

The documentation for this endpoint is the following:

To add the event topic and event objects for GET events-topics/1/events, we use a hook. This hook is written in hook_main.py file and is run before the request is made.

We add this decorator on the function which will add objects to the database. This decorator basically traverses the APIB docs following level with number of ‘#’ in the documentation to ‘>’ in the decorator. So for
 we have,

Now let’s write the method itself. In the method here, we first add the event topic object using EventTopic Factory defined in the factories/event-topic.py file, the code for which can be found here.

Since the endpoint also requires some event to be created in order to fetch events related to an event topic, we add an event object too based on the EventFactoryBasic class in factories/event.py  file. [Code]

To fetch the event related to a topic, the event must be referenced in that particular event topic. This is achieved by passing event_topic_id=1 when creating the event object, so that for the event that is created by the constructor, event topic is set as id = 1.
event = EventFactoryBasic(event_topic_id=1)
In the EventFactoryBasic class, the event_topic_id is set as ‘None’, so that we don’t have to create event topic for creating events in other endpoints testing also. This also lets us to not add event-topic as a related factory. To add event_topic_id=1 as the event’s attribute, an event topic with id = 1 must be already present, hence event_topic object is added first.
After adding the event object also, we commit both of these into the database. Now that we have an event topic object with id = 1, an event object with id = 1 , and the event is related to that event topic, we can make a call to GET event-topics/1/events and get the correct response.

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Adding Event Type – Event Endpoint Docs in Open Event API Server

As part of the extensive documentation written for Open Event API Server, event list endpoint with regards to event type had to be added to API Blueprint docs. The endpoint under consideration in this blogpost is:

GET https://api.eventyay.com/v1/event-types?sort=identifier&filter=[]

This endpoint returns a list of events for a specific event type. These event types are used for categorising similar types of events in the API Server. One example for an event type is : Camp, Treat & Retreat

With "slug": "camp-treat-retreat"
API Blueprint docs: 

To add the documentation in api_bluprint.apib file, we need to define the collection list and different levels using different numbers of ‘#’ . Since this endpoint is classified under the collection group Events, we first write it under # Events Collection
Now, since this is a separate and standalone endpoint, we describe the URL format for this in the following manner:

GET https://api.eventyay.com/v1/event-types?sort=identifier&filter=[]

Defining the parameters for the url includes

  • Page size: 10
  • Page number: 2
  • Sort: ‘identifier’
  • Filter_by : [none]

On the third level we define the type of request to be made along with the endpoint description, which in this case is :
### List All Events of an Event Type [GET]
Get a list of events.
This defines the GET request being made to the URL

GET https://api.eventyay.com/v1/event-types?sort=identifier&filter=[]

 The next step is adding the request headers to the docs. In the API server each request will contain the JWT Authentication token and one or more of Content-type or Accept attribute depending on the request method: GET, PATCH, DELETE or POST.
In any case the value for both of these will be:

Content-Typeapplication/vnd.api+json
Acceptapplication/vnd.api+json, (mime type for JSONAPI 0.1 specs)
Authentication token included in the following format:
AuthorizationJWT <Auth Key>
 

The response obtained from making a call to this endpoint is added next.API Blueprint describes adding the Response along with the mime type.
+ Response 200 (application/vnd.api+json)

To parse this document correctly, apiary requires the response data to be added starting at column 9, which means 8 spaces have to be left before it. Indenting with TAB is currently not supported by apiary for api blueprint docs and will give rise to compilation error if tab indentation is found. If not properly indented, semantic issues will arise on compilation, but the tests proceed with a valid document. To ensure that this document is syntactically correct, we need to check once which can be done on apiary’s site. The compilation tool there raises proper issues, exceptions and errors. If the  document is valid, it is rendered side-by-side using api blueprint’s default theme. It is a helpful tool for on the fly editing for apib documentation. The tool and my copy of documentation can be found at: 
https://app.apiary.io/eopenevent/editor

The response data as received from making the GET request is added below. This data in this case includes

"meta": {
    "count": 1 
     },
    "data": [
         {}
     ]

Meta data contains the count of number of events for the given event-type, here : 1.
The details of each event is contained in the list defined by data. 
This is excluded from here as it can be simply found on  API Servers’ Documentation.

Related:
API Blueprint | Write the Docs – APIB Docs
Apiary.io
API Blueprint tutorial | Writing REST APIs – I’d rather be writing, blog

 

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Working with Activity API in Open Event API Server


Recently, I added the Activities API with documentation and dredd tests for the same in
Open Event API Server. The Activity Model in the Open Event Server is basically a log of all the things that happen while the server is running, like – event updates, speaker additions, invoice generations and other similar things. This blogpost explains how to implement Activity API in the Open Event API Server’s nextgen branch. In the Open Event Server, we first add the endpoints, then document these so that the consumers ( Open Event Orga App, Open Event Frontend) find it easy to work with all the endpoints.

We also test the documentation against backend implementation to ensure that a end-developer who is working with the APIs is not misled to believe what each endpoint actually does in the server.

We also test the documentation against backend implementation to ensure that a end-developer who is working with the APIs is not misled to believe what each endpoint actually does in the server.
The Activities API endpoints are based on the Activity database model. The Activity table has four columns – 
id, actor, time, action, the names are self-explanatory. Now for the API schema, we need to make fields corresponding these columns.
Since id is auto generated, we do not need to add it as a field for API. Also the activity model’s __init__ method stamps time with the current system time. So this field is also not required in the API fields. We are left with two fields- actor and action.

Defining API Schema

Next, we define the API Schema class for Activities model. This will involve a Meta class and fields for the class.The Meta class contains the metadata of the class. This includes details about type_,

self_view, self_view_kwargs and an inflect parameter to dasherize the input fields from request body.

We define the four fields – id, actor, time and action according to marshmallow fields based on the data type and parameters from the activities model. Since id, actor and action are string columns and time is a DateTime column, the fields are written as following:

The id field is marked as dump only because it is a read-only type field. The other fields are marked with allow_none as they are all non-required field.

ActivityList Class:
The activity list class will provide us with the endpoint: “/v1/activities”

This endpoint will list all the activities. Since we wanted only GET requests to be working for this, so defined method = [‘GET’, ] for ResourceList. The activities are to be internally created based on different actions like creating an event, updating an event, adding speakers to sessions and likewise. Since the activities are to be shown only to the server admin, 
is_admin permission is used from the permission manager.

ActivityDetail Class:

The activity detail gives methods to work with an activity based on the activity id.
The endpoint provided is :  ‘/v1/activity/<int:activity_id>’

Since this is also an admin-only accessible GET only endpoint the following was written:

Writing Documentation:

The documentation is written using API Blueprint. Since we have two endpoints to document : /v1/activities and /v1/activities/<int:activity_id> both GET only.

So we begin by defining the ‘Group Activities’ , under which we first list  ‘Activity Collection’ which essentially is the Activity List class.

For this class, we have the endpoint:  /v1/activities. This is added for GET request. The parameters – actor, time and action are described along with description, type and whether they are required or not.

The request headers are written as part of the docs followed by the expected response.

Next we write the ‘Activity Details’ which represents the ActivityDetail class. Here the endpoint /v1/activities/<int:activity_id> is documented for GET. The parameter here is activity_id, which is the id of the activity to get the details of.

Writing DREDD Test for Documentation

To imitate the request responses, we need a faker script which creates an object of the the class we are testing the docs for then makes the request. For this we use FactoryBoy and dredd hooks to insert data into the database.

Defining Factory Model for Activity db model

The above is the factory model for activity model. It is derived from

factory.alchemy.SQLAlchemyModelFactory. The meta class defines the db model and sqlalchemy session to be used. The actor and action have dummy strings as part of the request body.

Writing Hooks
Now to test these endpoints we need to add objects to the database so that the GET requests have an object to fetch. This is done by dredd hooks. Before each request, an object of the corresponding factory class is initialised and committed into the database. Thus a dummy object is available for dredd to test on. The request is made and the real output is compared with the expected output written in the API Blueprint documentation.

This is what the hooks look like for  this endpoint: GET /activities

Now if the expected responses and actual responses match, the dredd test successfully passes. This dredd test in run on each build of the project on Travis to ensure that documented code does exactly what is says!

This concludes the process to write an API right from Schema to Resources and Documentation and Dredd tests.

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Using Marshmallow Fields in Open Event API Server

The nextgen Open Event API Server  provides API endpoints to fetch the data, and to modify and update it. These endpoints have been written using flask-rest-jsonapi, which is a flask extension to build APIs around the specifications provided by JSONAPI 1.0. This extension helps you, quoting from their website:

flask-rest-jsonAPI’s data abstraction layer lets us expose the resources in a flexible way. This is achieved by using Marshmallow fields by marshmallow-jsonapi. This blog post explains how we use the marshmallow fields for building API endpoints in Open Event API Server.

The marshmallow library is used to serialize, deserialize and validate input data. Marshmallow uses classes to define output schemas. This makes it easier to reuse and configure the and also extend the schemas. When we write the API Schema for any database model from the Open Event models, all the columns have to be added as schema fields in the API class.

This is the API Server’s event schema using marshmallow fields:

These are the Marshmallow Field classes for various types of data. You can pass the following parameters when creating a field object. The ones which are used in the API Server as described below. For the rest, you can read more on marshmallow docs.

Let’s take a look at each of these fields. Each of the following snippets sample writing fields for API Schema.

identifier = fields.Str(dump_only=True)
  • This is a field of data-type String.
  • dump_only :  This field will be skipped during deserialization as it is set to True here. Setting this true essentially means marking `identifier` as read-only( for HTTP API) 
name = fields.Str(required=True)
  • This again is a field of data-type String.
  • This is a required field and a ValidationError is raised if found missing during deserialization. Taking a look at the database backend:

Since this field is set to non-nullable in the database model, it is made required in API Schema.

 external_event_url = fields.Url(allow_none=True)
  • This is a field of datatype URL.
  • Since this is not a required field, NULL values are allowed for this field in the database model. To reflect the same in the API, we have to add allow_none=True. If missing=None is unset, it defaults to false.
ends_at = fields.DateTime(required=Truetimezone=True)
  • Field of datatype DateTime
  • It is a required field for an event and the time used here is timezone aware.
latitude = fields.Float(validate=lambda n: -90 <= n <= 90allow_none=True)
  • Field of datatype Float.
  • In marshmallow fields, we can use validator clauses on the input value of a field using the validate: parameter. It returns a boolean, which when false raises a Validation Error. These validators are called during deserialization.
is_map_shown = fields.Bool(default=False)
  • Field of datatype boolean.
  • Default value for the marshmallow fields can be set by defining using default: Here, is_map_shown attribute is set to false as default for an event.
privacy = fields.Str(default="public")
  • privacy is set to default “public”.

When the input value for a field is missing during serialization, the default value will be used. This parameter can either be a value or a callable.

As described in the examples above, you can write the field as field.<data-type>(*parameters to marshmallow.fields.Field constructor*).

The parameters passed to the class constructor must reflect the column definition in the database model, else you might run into unexpected errors. An example to quote from Open Event development would be that null values were not being allowed to be posted even for nullable columns. This behavior was because allow_none defaults to false in schema, and it has to be explicitly set to True in order to receive null values. ( Issue for the same: Make non-required attributes nullable and the Pull Request made for fix.)

Fields represent a database model column and are serialized and deserialized, so that these can be used in any format, like JSON objects which we use in API server. Each field corresponds to an attribute of the object type like location, starts-at, ends-at, event-url for an event. marshmallow allows us to define data-types for the fields, validate input data and reinforce column level constraints from database model.

This list is not exhaustive of all the parameters available for marshmallow fields. To read further about them and marshmallow, check out their documentation.

Additional Resources

Code involved in API Server:

Continue ReadingUsing Marshmallow Fields in Open Event API Server

Running ngrok To Use Local Open Event API Server Endpoints From Public Access URL

How to setup and run ngrok?

To run ngrok, you need to download it from the ngrok website. The download page can be found here.

Once you have the zip installed, you’ll need to unzip it. On Linux or MacOS, run this in the terminal:

$ unzip /path/to/ngrok.zip

To expose the web server running on your local machine, run the following from inside the directory where you have unzipped ngrok:

./ngrok http 80

This syntax breakdowns to :
ngrok :: terminal command

http :: protocol of the server that is to be tunneled

( ngrok also lets you open and run TCP and TLS tunnels)

80 :: port on which the tunnel is to be run

( If you are not sure of the port on which your server is running, it might probably be 80 – the default for HTTP)

The Open Event API server runs on port 5000 and it provided HTTP API, so the command we’ll use here is

./ngrok http 5000

Once you run this command, ngrok opens its UI in the terminal itself. This will contain the public url of your tunnel along with other stats related to the requests being made and traffic on localhost.

Starting ngrok:Screenshot_20170718_155834.png

Public URL updated:

ngrok also offers a web interface where you can see the requests and other data which is shown in the terminal. For this go to http://localhost:4040/inspect/http. This web interface inspects and records each request made so that you can replay the requests again for debugging or cross-checking metrics. This feature can be turned off by passing an argument, so that the requests are not recorded anymore. While running a production server, it can help to both maintain security for the requests and also reduce request handling times when scaling. To read more about advanced options, please read the ngrok documentation.

Running Open Event API server on the public URL:
Since now we have localhost:5000 tunnelled over a public url, we’ll use that to make requests to the API server.

A GET request for /v1/events :

The request made to the public URL, which in this case here is:

http://9a5ac170.ngrok.io is equivalent to this url: http://localhost:5000  running on my local setup of the Open Event API Server. When the request is made, the EventList class is used and ResourceList class’ method which is build for the url endpoint ‘event_list’ is called. This returns a list of events from the current database which is being used on my server, thus my local database.

A DELETE request for /v1/events/1

In a similar fashion, when this request is made, event_id is parsed from view_kwargs and the following equivalent request is made: DELETE http://localhost:5000/v1/events/1 which deletes the  event with id = 1 and returns a success object as shown in the screenshot above.

ngrok tunnel is often initiated on the client-side firsthowever it can hash out a secure channel with the server, which is a very slick way to obtain a work around standard firewall configurations. One thing to keep in mind is that as soon as you quit the terminal UI, the tunnel will be closed and re-running ngrok will lead to the creation of a new public url, so you might have to share that again. To prevent this from happening, you can specify a custom url with a Cname configuration. You can also run ngrok with a custom url on your own domain. This can be used to run development servers for sub-projects under a particular domain. Adding auth improves security and can restrict usage to people from the same organization, let’s say.

You can also access the documentation page directly with the public url.

Adding auth to protect Open Event localhost:
Anyone with the public url can access your localhost and can make changes. To prevent this we can use the auth switch with ngrok command. This will enforce Basic Auth on each request.

ngrok http -auth="username:password" 5000

Apart from these, ngrok tunnels can be used for file system sharing, mobile device testing and also to build webhooks integrations.

Additional Resources

Continue ReadingRunning ngrok To Use Local Open Event API Server Endpoints From Public Access URL