Implementing Permissions for Orders API in Open Event API Server

Open Event API Server Orders API is one of the core APIs. The permissions in Orders API are robust and secure enough to ensure no leak on payment and ticketing.The permission manager provides the permissions framework to implement the permissions and proper access controls based on the dev handbook.

The following table is the permissions in the developer handbook.

 

List View Create Update Delete
Superadmin/admin
Event organizer [1] [1] [1] [1][2] [1][3]
Registered user [4]
Everyone else
  1. Only self-owned events
  2. Can only change order status
  3. A refund will also be initiated if paid ticket
  4. Only if order placed by self

Super Admins and admins are allowed to create any order with any amount but any coupon they apply is not consumed on creating order. They can update almost every field of the order and can provide any custom status to the order. Permissions are applied with the help of Permission Manager which takes care the authorization roles. For example, if a permission is set based on admin access then it is automatically set for super admin as well i.e., to the people with higher rank.

Self-owned events

This allows the event admins, Organizer and Co-Organizer to manage the orders of the event they own. This allows then to view all orders and create orders with or without discount coupon with any custom price and update status of orders. Event admins can provide specific status while others cannot

if not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=data['event']):
   data['status'] = 'pending'

And Listing requires Co-Organizer access

elif not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=kwargs['event_id']):
   raise ForbiddenException({'source': ''}, "Co-Organizer Access Required")

Can only change order status

The organizer cannot change the order fields except the status of the order. Only Server Admin and Super Admins are allowed to update any field of the order.

if not has_access('is_admin'):
   for element in data:
       if element != 'status':
           setattr(data, element, getattr(order, element))

And Delete access is prohibited to event admins thus only Server admins can delete orders by providing a cancelling note which will be provided to the Attendee/Buyer.

def before_delete_object(self, order, view_kwargs):
   if not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=order.event.id):
       raise ForbiddenException({'source': ''}, 'Access Forbidden')

Registered User

A registered user can create order with basic details like the attendees’ records and payment method with fields like country and city. They are not allowed to provide any custom status to the order they are creating. All orders will be set by default to “pending”

Also, they are not allowed to update any field in their order. Any status update will be done internally thus maintaining the security of Order System. Although they are allowed to view their place orders. This is done by comparing their logged in user id with the user id of the purchaser.

if not has_access('is_coorganizer_or_user_itself', event_id=order.event_id, user_id=order.user_id):
   return ForbiddenException({'source': ''}, 'Access Forbidden')

Event Admins

The event admins have one more restriction, as an event admin, you cannot provide discount coupon and even if you do it will be ignored.

# Apply discount only if the user is not event admin
if data.get('discount') and not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=data['event']):

Also an event admin any amount you will provide on creating order will be final and there will be no further calculation of the amount will take place

if not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=data['event']):
   TicketingManager.calculate_update_amount(order)

Creating Attendees Records

Before sending a request to Orders API it is required to create to attendees mapped to some ticket and for this registered users are allowed to create the attendees without adding a relationship of the order. The mapping with the order is done internally by Orders API and its helpers.

Resources

  1. Dev Handbook – Niranjan R
    The Open Event Developer Handbook
  2. Flask-REST-JSONAPI Docs
    Permissions and Data layer | Flask-REST-JSONAPI
  3. A guide to use permission manager in API Server
    https://blog.fossasia.org/a-guide-to-use-permission-manager-in-open-event-api-server/

 

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Generating Ticket PDFs in Open Event API Server

In the ordering system of Open Event API Server, there is a requirement to send email notifications to the attendees. These attendees receive the URL of the pdf of the generated ticket. On creating the order, first the pdfs are generated and stored in the preferred storage location and then these are sent to the users through the email.

Generating PDF is a simple process, using xhtml2pdf we can generate PDFs from the html. The generated pdf is then passed to storage helpers to store it in the desired location and pdf-url is updated in the attendees record.

Sample PDF

PDF Template

The templates are written in HTML which is then converted using the module xhtml2pdf.
To store the templates a new directory was created at  app/templates where all HTML files are stored. Now, The template directory needs to be updated at flask initializing app so that template engine can pick the templates from there. So in app/__init__.py we updated flask initialization with

template_dir = os.path.dirname(__file__) + "/templates"

app = Flask(__name__, static_folder=static_dir, template_folder=template_dir)

This allows the template engine to pick the templates files from this template directory.

Generating PDFs

Generating PDF is done by rendering the html template first. This html content is then parsed into the pdf

file = open(dest, "wb")

pisa.CreatePDF(cStringIO.StringIO(pdf_data.encode('utf-8')), file)

file.close()

The generated pdf is stored in the temporary location and then passed to storage helper to upload it.

uploaded_file = UploadedFile(dest, filename)

upload_path = UPLOAD_PATHS['pdf']['ticket_attendee'].format(identifier=get_file_name())

new_file = upload(uploaded_file, upload_path)

This generated pdf path is returned here

Rendering HTML and storing PDF

for holder in order.ticket_holders:

  if holder.id != current_user.id:

      pdf = create_save_pdf(render_template('/pdf/ticket_attendee.html', order=order, holder=holder))

  else:

      pdf = create_save_pdf(render_template('/pdf/ticket_purchaser.html', order=order))

  holder.pdf_url = pdf

  save_to_db(holder)

The html is rendered using flask template engine and passed to create_save_pdf and link is updated on the attendee record.

Sending PDF on email

These pdfs are sent as a link to the email after creating the order. Thus a ticket is sent to each attendee and a summarized order details with attendees to the purchased.

send_email(

  to=holder.email,

  action=TICKET_PURCHASED_ATTENDEE,

  subject=MAILS[TICKET_PURCHASED_ATTENDEE]['subject'].format(

      event_name=order.event.name,

      invoice_id=order.invoice_number

  ),

  html= MAILS[TICKET_PURCHASED_ATTENDEE]['message'].format(

      pdf_url=holder.pdf_url,

      event_name=order.event.name

  )

)

References

  1. Readme – xhtml2pdf
    https://github.com/xhtml2pdf/xhtml2pdf/blob/master/README.rst
  2. Using xhtml2pdf and create pdfs
    https://micropyramid.com/blog/generating-pdf-files-in-python-using-xhtml2pdf/

 

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Copying Event in Open Event API Server

The Event Copy feature of Open Event API Server provides the ability to create a xerox copy of event copies with just one API call. This feature creates the complete copy of event by copying the related objects as well like tracks, sponsors, micro-locations, etc. This API is based on the simple method where an object is first removed is from current DB session and then applied make_transient. Next step is to remove the unique identifying columns like “id”, “identifier” and generating the new identifier and saving the new record. The process seems simple but becomes a little complex when you have to generate copies of media files associated and copies of related multiple objects ensuring no orders, attendees, access_codes relations are copied.

Initial Step

The first thing to copy the event is first to get the event object and all related objects first

if view_kwargs.get('identifier').isdigit():
   identifier = 'id'

event = safe_query(db, Event, identifier, view_kwargs['identifier'], 'event_'+identifier)

Next thing is to get all related objects to this event.

Creating the new event

After removing the current event object from “db.session”, It is required to remove “id” attribute and regenerate “identifier” of the event.

db.session.expunge(event)  # expunge the object from session
make_transient(event)
delattr(event, 'id')
event.identifier = get_new_event_identifier()
db.session.add(event)
db.session.commit()

Updating related object with new event

The new event created has new “id” and “identifier”. This new “id” is added into foreign keys columns of the related object thus providing a relationship with the new event created.

for ticket in tickets:
   ticket_id = ticket.id
   db.session.expunge(ticket)  # expunge the object from session
   make_transient(ticket)
   ticket.event_id = event.id
   delattr(ticket, 'id')
   db.session.add(ticket)
   db.session.commit()

Finishing up

The last step of Updating related objects is repeated for all related objects to create the copy. Thus a new event is created with all related objects copied with the single endpoint.

References

How to clone a sqlalchemy object
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28871406/how-to-clone-a-sqlalchemy-db-object-with-new-primary-key

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Reset password in Open Event API Server

The addition of reset password API in the Open Event API Server enables the user to send a forgot password request to the server so that user can reset the password. Reset Password API is a two step process. The first endpoint allows you to request a token to reset the password and this token is sent to the user via email. The second process is making a PATCH request with the token and new password to set the new password on user’s account.

Creating a Reset token

This endpoint is not JSON spec based API. A reset token is simply a hash of random bits which is stored in a specific column of user’s table.

hash_ = random.getrandbits(128)
self.reset_password = str(hash_)

Once the user completed the resetting of the password using the specific token, the old token is flushed and the new token is generated. These tokens are all one time use only.

Requesting a Token

A token can be requested on a specific endpoint  POST /v1/auth/reset-password
The token with the direct link will be sent to registered email.

link = make_frontend_url('/reset-password', {'token': user.reset_password})
send_email_with_action(user, PASSWORD_RESET,     
                       app_name=get_settings()['app_name'], link=link)

Flow with frontend

The flow is broken into 2 steps with front end is serving to the backend. The user when click on forget password will be redirected to reset password page in the front end which will call the API endpoint in the backend with an email to send the token. The email received will contain the link for the front end URL which when clicked will redirect the user to the front end page of providing the new password. The new password entered with the token will be sent to API server by the front end and reset password will complete.

Updating Password

Once clicked on the link in the email, the user will be asked to provide the new password. This password will be sent to the endpoint PATCH /v1/auth/reset-password. The body will receive the token and the new password to update. The user will be identified using the token and password is updated for the respective user.

try:
   user = User.query.filter_by(reset_password=token).one()
except NoResultFound:
   return abort(
       make_response(jsonify(error="User not found"), 404)
   )
else:
   user.password = password
   save_to_db(user)

References

  1. Understand Self-service reset password
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-service_password_reset
  2. Python – getrandbits()
    https://docs.python.org/2/library/random.html
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Post Payment Charging in Open Event API Server

Order flow in Open Event API Server follows very simple process. On successfully creating a order through API server the user receives the payment-url. API server out of the box provides support for two payment gateways, stripe and paypal.
The process followed is very simple, on creating the order you will receive the payment-url. The frontend will complete the payment through that url and on completion it will hit the specific endpoint which will confirm the payment and update the order status.

Getting the payment-url

Payment Url will be sent on successfully creating the order. There are three type of payment-modes which can be provided to Order API on creating order. The three payment modes are “free”, “stripe” and “paypal”. To get the payment-url just send the payment mode as stripe or paypal.

POST Payment

After payment processing through frontend, the charges endpoint will be called so that payment verification can be done on the server end.

POST /v1/orders/<identifier>/charge

This endpoint receives the stripe token if the payment mode is stripe else no token is required to process payment for paypal.
The response will have the order details on successful verification.

Implementation

The implementation of charging is based on the custom data layer in Orga Server. The custom layer overrides the Base data layer and provide the custom implementation to “create_object” method thus, not using Alchemy layer.

def create_object(self, data, view_kwargs):
   order = Order.query.filter_by(id=view_kwargs['id']).first()
   if order.payment_mode == 'stripe':
       if data.get('stripe') is None:
           raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': ''}, "stripe token is missing")
       success, response = TicketingManager.charge_stripe_order_payment(order, data['stripe'])
       if not success:
           raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'stripe_token_id'}, response)

   elif order.payment_mode == 'paypal':
       success, response = TicketingManager.charge_paypal_order_payment(order)
       if not success:
           raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': ''}, response)
   return order

With the resource class as

class ChargeList(ResourceList):
   methods = ['POST', ]
   schema = ChargeSchema

   data_layer = {
       'class': ChargesLayer,
       'session': db.session
   }

Resources

  1. Paypal Payments API
    https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/payments/
  2. Flask-json-api custom layer docs
    http://flask-rest-jsonapi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/data_layer.html#custom-data-layer
  3. Stripe Payments API
    https://stripe.com/docs/charges
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Using Order Endpoints in Open Event API Server

The main feature i.e., Ordering API is added into API server. These endpoints provide the ability to work with the ordering system. This API is not simple like other as it checks for the discount codes and various other things as well.
The process in layman terms is very simple, first, a user must be registered or added as an attendee into Server without any order_id associated and then the attendee details will be sent to API server as a relationship.

Things needed to take care:

  1. Validating the discount code and ensure it is not exhausted
  2. Calculating the total amount on the server side by applying coupon
  3. Do not calculate amount if the user is the event admin
  4. Do not use coupon if user is event admin
  5. Handling payment modes and generating payment links
  6. Ensure that default status is always pending, unless the user is event admin

Creating Order

    • Prerequisite
      Before initiating the order, attendee records needs to be created associated with the event. These records will not have any order_id associated with them initially. The Order API will add the relationships.
    • Required Body
      Order API requires you to send event relationship and attendee records to create order_tickets
    • Permissions
      Only organizers can provide custom amount and status. Others users will get their status as pending and amount will be recalculated in server. The response will reflect the calculated amount and updated status.
      Also to initiate any order, user must be logged in. Guest can not create any order
    • Payment Modes
      There are three payment modes, free, stripe and paypal. If payment_mode is not provided then API will consider it as “free”.
    • Discount Codes
      Discount code can be sent as a relationship to the API. The Server will validate the code and will act accordingly.

Validating Discount Codes

Discount codes are checked to ensure they are valid, first check ensures that the user is not co-organizer

# Apply discount only if the user is not event admin
if data.get('discount') and not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=data['event']):

Second, check ensures that the discount code is active

if not discount_code.is_active:
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, "Inactive Discount Code")

The third, Check ensures its validity is not expired

if not (valid_from <= now <= valid_till):
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, "Inactive Discount Code")

Fourth Check ensure that the quantity is not exhausted

if not TicketingManager.match_discount_quantity(discount_code, data['ticket_holders']):
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, 'Discount Usage Exceeded')

Lastly, the fifth check ensures that event id matches with given discount associated event

if discount_code.event.id != data['event'] and discount_code.user_for == TICKET:
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, "Invalid Discount Code")

Calculating Order Amount

The next important thing is to recalculate the order amount and it will calculated only if user is not the event admin

if not has_access('is_coorganizer', **view_kwargs):
  TicketingManager.calculate_update_amount(order)

API Response

The API response apart from general fields will provide you the payment-url depending upon the payment mode you selected.

  • Stripe : will give payment-url as stripe
  • Paypal: will provide the payment completing url in payment-url

This all explains the flow and requirements to create an order. Order API consists of many more things related with TIcketing Manager which works to create the payment url and apply discount count as well as calculate the total order amount.

Resources

  1. Stripe Payments API Docs
    https://stripe.com/docs/api
  2. Paypal Payments API docs
    https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/
  3. Paypal Sandbox docs
    https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/lifecycle/ug_sandbox/

 

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Managing Related Endpoints in Permission Manager of Open Event API Server

Open Event API Server has its permission manager to manage all permission to different endpoints and some of the left gaps were filled by new helper method has_access. The next challenge for permission manager was to incorporate a feature many related endpoints points to the same resource.
Example:

  • /users-events-roles/<int:users_events_role_id>/user or
  • /event-invoices/<int:event_invoice_id>/user

Both endpoints point to Users API where they are fetching the record of a single user and for this, we apply the permission “is_user_itself”. This permission ensures that the logged in user is the same user whose record is asked through the API and for this we need the “user_id” as the “id” in the permission function, “is_user_itself”
Thus there is need to add the ability in permission manager to fetch this user_id from different models for different endpoints. For example, if we consider above endpoints then we need the ability to get user_id from UsersEventsRole and EventInvoice models and pass it to permission function so that it can use it for the check.

Adding support

To add support for multiple keys, we have to look for two things.

  • fetch_key_url
  • model

These two are key attributes to add this feature, fetch_key_url will take the comma separated list which will be matched with view_kwargs and model receives the array of the Model Classes which will be used to fetch the related records from the model
This snippet provides the main logic for this:

for index, mod in enumerate(model):
   if is_multiple(fetch_key_url):
       f_url = fetch_key_url[index]
   else:
       f_url = fetch_key_url
   try:
       data = mod.query.filter(getattr(mod, fetch_key_model) == view_kwargs[f_url]).one()
   except NoResultFound, e:
       pass
   else:
       found = True

if not found:
   return NotFoundError({'source': ''}, 'Object not found.').respond()

From the above snippet we are:

  • We iterate through the models list
  • Check if fetch_key_url has multiple keys or not
  • Get the key from fetch_key_url on the basis of multiple keys or single key in it.
  • We try to attempt to get object from model for the respective iteration
  • If there is any record/object in the database then it’s our data. Skipping further process
  • Else continue iteration till we get the object or to the end.

To use multiple mode

Instead of providing the single model to the model option of permission manager, provide an array of models. Also, it is optional to provide comma separated values to fetch_key_url
Now there can be scenario where you want to fetch resource from database model using different keys present on your view_kwargs
for example, consider these endpoints

  1. `/notifications/<notification_id>/event`
  2. `/orders/<order_id>/event`

Since they point to same resource and if you want to ensure that logged in user is organizer then you can use these two things as:

  1. fetch_key_url=”notification_id, order_id”
  2. model=[Notification, Order]

Permission manager will always match indexes in both options, the first key of fetch_key_url will be only used for the first key of the model and so on.
Also, fetch_key_url is an optional parameter and even in multiple mode you can provide a single value as well.  But if you provide multiple commas separated values make sure you provide all values such that no of values in fetch_key_url and model must be equal.

Resources

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Custom Data Layer in Open Event API Server

Open Event API Server uses flask-rest-jsonapi module to implement JSON API. This module provides a good logical abstraction in the data layer.
The data layer is a CRUD interface between resource manager and data. It is a very flexible system to use any ORM or data storage. The default layer you get in flask-rest-jsonapi is the SQLAlchemy ORM Layer and API Server makes use of default alchemy layer almost everywhere except the case where I worked on email verification part.

To add support for adding user’s email verification in API Server, there was need to create an endpoint for POST /v1/users/<int:user_id>/verify
Clearly here we are working on a single resource i.e, specific user record. This requires us to use ResourceDetail and the only issue was there is no any POST method or view in ResourceDetail class. To solve this I created a custom data layer which enables me to redefine all methods and views by inheriting abstract class. A custom data layer must inherit from flask_rest_jsonapi.data_layers.base.Base.

Creating Custom Layer

To solve email verification process, a custom layer was created at app/api/data_layers/VerifyUserLayer.py

def create_object(self, data, view_kwargs):
   user = safe_query(self, User, 'id', view_kwargs['user_id'], 'user_id')
   s = get_serializer()
   try:
       data = s.loads(data['token'])
   except Exception:
       raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'token'}, "Invalid Token")

   if user.email == data[0]:
       user.is_verified = True
       save_to_db(user)
       return user
   else:
       raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'token'}, "Invalid Token")

Using custom layer in API

We can easily provide custom layer in API Resource using one of the properties of the Resource Class

data_layer = {
   'class': VerifyUserLayer,
   'session': db.session
}

This is all we have to provide in the custom layer, now all CRUD method will be directed to our custom data layer.

Solution to our issue
Setting up custom layer provides us the ability to create our custom resource methods, i.e, modifying the view for POST request and allowing us to verify the registered users in API Server.
On Setting up the data layer all I need to do is create a ResourceList with using this layer and with permissions

class VerifyUser(ResourceList):

   methods = ['POST', ]
   decorators = (jwt_required,)
   schema = VerifyUserSchema
   data_layer = {
       'class': VerifyUserLayer,
       'session': db.session
   }

This enables me to use the custom layer, VerifyUserLayer for ResourceList resource.

Resources

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A guide to use Permission Manager in Open Event API Server

This article provides a simple guide to use permission manager in Open Event API Server. Permission manager is constantly being improved and new features are being added into it. To ensure that all co-developers get to know about it and make use of them, this blog posts describes every part of permission manager.

Bootstrapping

Permission manager as a part of flask-rest-jsonapi works as a decorator for different resources of the API. There are two ways to provide the permission decorator to any view

  • First one is to provide it in the list of decorators
decorators = (api.has_permission('is_coorganizer', fetch="event_id",
                                fetch_as="event_id", model=StripeAuthorization),)
    • Second way is to explicitly provide it as a decorator to any view
@api.has_permission('custom_arg', custom_kwargs='custom_kwargs')
    def get(*args, **kwargs):
        return 'Hello world !'

In the process of booting up, we first need to understand the flow of Resources in API. All resources even before doing any schema check, call the decorators. So this way you will not get any request data in the permission methods. All you will receive is a dict of the URL parameters but again it will not include the filter parameters.
Permission Manager receives five parameters as: 

def permission_manager(view, view_args, view_kwargs, *args, **kwargs):

First three are provided into it implicitly by flask-rest-jsonapi module

  • view: This is the resource’s view method which is called through the API. For example, if I go to /events then the get method of ResourceList will be called.
  • view_args: These are args associated with that view.
  • view_kwargs: These are kwargs associated with that resource view. It includes all your URL parameters as well.
  • args: These are the custom args which are provided when calling the permission manager. Here at permission manager is it expected that the first index of args will be the name of permission to check for.
  • kwargs: This is the custom dict which is provided on calling the permission manager. The main pillar of the permission manager. Described below in usage.

Using Permission Manager

Using permission manager is basically understanding the different options you can send through the kwargs so here is the list of the things you can send to permission manager
These are all described in the order of priority in permission manager

  • method (string): You can provide a string containing the methods where permission needs to be checked as comma separated values of different methods in a string.
    For example: method=”GET,POST”
  • leave_if (lambda): This receives a lambda function which should return boolean values. Based on returned value if is true then it will skip the permission check. The provided lambda function receives only parameter, “view_kwargs”
    Example use case can be the situation where you can leave the permission for any specifically related endpoint to some resource and would like to do a manual check in the method itself.
  • check (lambda): Opposite to leave_if. It receives a lambda function that will return boolean values. Based on returned value, If it is true then only it will go further and check the request for permissions else will throw forbidden error.
  • fetch (string): This is the string containing the name of the key which has to be fetched for the fetch_as key (described below). Permission manager will first look for this value in view_kwargs dict object. If it is not there then it will make the query to get one(described below at model )
  • fetch_as (string): This is the string containing the name of a key. The value of fetch key will be sent to the permission functions by this name.
  • model (string): This is one most interesting concept here. To get the value of the fetch key. Permission manager first looks into view_kwargs and if there no such value then you can still get one through the model. The model attribute here receives the class of the database model which will be used to get the value of the fetch key.
    It makes the query to get the single resource from this model and look for the value of the fetch key and then pass it to the permission functions/methods.
    The interesting part is that by default it uses <id> from view_kwargs to get the resource from the model but in any case if there is no specific ID with name <id> on the view_kwargs. You can use these two options as:
  • fetch_key_url (string): This is the name of the key whose value will be fetched from view_kwargs and will be used to match the records in database model to get the resource.
  • fetch_key_model (string): This is the name of the match column in the database model for the fetch_key_url, The value of it will be matched with the column named as the value of fetch_key_model.
    In case there is no record found in the model then permission manager will throw NotFound 404 Error.

A helper for permissions

The next big thing in permission manager is the addition of new helper function “has_access”

def has_access(access_level, **kwargs):
   if access_level in permissions:
       auth = permissions[access_level](lambda *a, **b: True, (), {}, (), **kwargs)
       if type(auth) is bool and auth is True:
           return True
   return False

This method allows you to check the permission at the mid of any method of any view and of any resource. Just provide the name of permission in the first parameter and then the additional options needed by the permission function as the kwargs values.
This does not throw any exception. Just returns the boolean value so take care of throwing any exception by yourselves.

Anything to improve on?

I will not say this exactly as the improvement but I would really like to make it more meaningful and interesting to add permission. May be something like this below:

permission = "Must be co_organizer OR track_organizer, fetch event_id as event_id, use model Event"

This clearly needs time to make it. But I see this as an interesting way to add permission. Just provide meaningful text and rest leave it to the permission manager.

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Image Uploading in Open Event API Server

Open Event API Server manages image uploading in a very simple way. There are many APIs such as “Event API” in API Server provides you data pointer in request body to send the image URL. Since you can send only URLs here if you want to upload any image you can use our Image Uploading API. Now, this uploading API provides you a temporary URL of your uploaded file. This is not the permanent storage but the good thing is that developers do not have to do anything else. Just send this temporary URL to the different APIs like the event one and rest of the work is done by APIs.
API Endpoints which receives the image URLs have their simple mechanism.

  • Create a copy of an uploaded image
  • Create different sizes of the uploaded image
  • Save all images to preferred storage. The Super Admin can set this storage in admin preferences

To better understand this, consider this sample request object to create an event

{
  "data": {
    "attributes": {
      "name": "New Event",
      "starts-at": "2002-05-30T09:30:10+05:30",
      "ends-at": "2022-05-30T09:30:10+05:30",
      "email": "example@example.com",
      "timezone": "Asia/Kolkata",
      "original-image-url": "https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2013/11/23/16/25/birds-216412_1280.jpg"
    },
    "type": "event"
  }
}

I have provided one attribute as “original-image-url”, server will open the image and create different images of different sizes as

      "is-map-shown": false,
      "original-image-url": "http://example.com/media/events/3/original/eUpxSmdCMj/43c6d4d2-db2b-460b-b891-1ceeba792cab.jpg",
      "onsite-details": null,
      "organizer-name": null,
      "can-pay-by-stripe": false,
      "large-image-url": "http://example.com/media/events/3/large/WEV4YUJCeF/f819f1d2-29bf-4acc-9af5-8052b6ab65b3.jpg",
      "timezone": "Asia/Kolkata",
      "can-pay-onsite": false,
      "deleted-at": null,
      "ticket-url": null,
      "can-pay-by-paypal": false,
      "location-name": null,
      "is-sponsors-enabled": false,
      "is-sessions-speakers-enabled": false,
      "privacy": "public",
      "has-organizer-info": false,
      "state": "Draft",
      "latitude": null,
      "starts-at": "2002-05-30T04:00:10+00:00",
      "searchable-location-name": null,
      "is-ticketing-enabled": true,
      "can-pay-by-cheque": false,
      "description": "",
      "pentabarf-url": null,
      "xcal-url": null,
      "logo-url": null,
      "can-pay-by-bank": false,
      "is-tax-enabled": false,
      "ical-url": null,
      "name": "New Event",
      "icon-image-url": "http://example.com/media/events/3/icon/N01BcTRUN2/65f25497-a079-4515-8359-ce5212e9669f.jpg",
      "thumbnail-image-url": "http://example.com/media/events/3/thumbnail/U2ZpSU1IK2/4fa07a9a-ef72-45f8-993b-037b0ad6dd6e.jpg",

We can clearly see that server is generating three other images on permanent storage as well as creating the copy of original-image-url into permanent storage.
Since we already have our Storage class, all we need to do is to make the little bit changes in it due to the decoupling of the Open Event. Also, I had to work on these points below

  • Fix upload module, provide support to generate url of locally uploaded file based on static_domain defined in settings
  • Using PIL create a method to generate new image by converting first it to jpeg(lower size than png) and resize it according to the aspect ratio
  • Create a helper method to create different sizes
  • Store all images in preferred storage.
  • Update APIs to incorporate this feature, drop any URLs in image pointers except original_image_url

Support for generating locally uploaded file’s URL
Here I worked on adding support to check if any static_domain is set by a user and used the request.url as the fallback.

if get_settings()['static_domain']:
        return get_settings()['static_domain'] + \
            file_relative_path.replace('/static', '')
    url = urlparse(request.url)
    return url.scheme + '://' + url.host + file_relative_path

Using PIL create a method to create image

This method is created to create the image based on any size passed it to as a parameter. The important role of this is to convert the image into jpg and then resize it on the basis of size and aspect ratio provided.
Earlier, in Orga Server, we were directly using the “open” method to open Image files but since they are no longer needed to be on the local server, a user can provide the link to any direct image. To add this support, all we needed is to use StringIO to turn the read string into a file-like object

image_file = cStringIO.StringIO(urllib.urlopen(image_file).read())

Next, I have to work on clearing the temporary images from the cloud which was created using temporary APIs. I believe that will be a cakewalk for locally stored images since I already had this support in this method.

if remove_after_upload:
        os.remove(image_file)

Update APIs to incorporate this feature
Below is an example how this works in an API.

if data.get('original_image_url') and data['original_image_url'] != event.original_image_url:
            uploaded_images = create_save_image_sizes(data['original_image_url'], 'event', event.id)
            data['original_image_url'] = uploaded_images['original_image_url']
            data['large_image_url'] = uploaded_images['large_image_url']
            data['thumbnail_image_url'] = uploaded_images['thumbnail_image_url']
            data['icon_image_url'] = uploaded_images['icon_image_url']
        else:
            if data.get('large_image_url'):
                del data['large_image_url']
            if data.get('thumbnail_image_url'):
                del data['thumbnail_image_url']
            if data.get('icon_image_url'):
                del data['icon_image_url']

Here the method “create_save_image_sizes” provides the different URL of different images of different sizes and we clearly dropping any other images of different sizes is provided by the user.

General Suggestion
Sometimes when we work on such issues there are some of the things to take care of for example, if you checked the first snippet, I tried to ensure that you will get the URL although it is sure that static_domain will not be blank, because even if the user (admin) doesn’t fill that field then it will be filled by server hostname
A similar situation is the one where there is no record in Image Sizes table, may be server admin didn’t add one. In that case, it will use the standard sizes stored in the codebase to create different images of different sizes.

Resources:

Continue ReadingImage Uploading in Open Event API Server