Alternative Serialization

Blacksmith has been designed to naturally supports JSON API. Json is the standard in Rest Style API so it is the default serialization.

But sometime you may want to supports alternative document format.

Natively, Blacksmith supports application/json and application/x-www-form-urlencoded format.

Request

To serialize a request in application/x-www-form-urlencoded, a header Content-Type can be added to the request model. Blacksmith will serialize the body using a x-www-form-urlencoded form.

from blacksmith import HeaderField, PostBodyField, Request


class MyFormURLEncodedRequest(Request):
    foo: str = PostBodyField()
    bar: int = PostBodyField()
    content_type: str = HeaderField(
        "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", alias="Content-Type"
    )

In the previous example, the fields foo and bar will be serialized in a x-www-form-urlencoded form.

such as MyFormURLEncodedRequest(foo="foo", bar=42) will be serialized to

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

foo=foo&bar=42

Important

In the request model, Content-Type is case sentitive.

Note

You may also note that the embeded urlencoded form version only supports flat structure, as is just a wrapper around the standard library function urllib.parse.urlencode.

Response

While serializing the response, the Content-Type header is also used to serialize the response body. And, if the response omit it, Blacksmith will assume it is a Json document. Usually posting for using application/x-www-form-urlencoded will not generate a response in this format but the internet is full of surprise!

Registering a new serializer

For extensibility, Blacksmith expose serialization are not a per client feature, serializers are globals and register unsing the function blacksmith.register_http_body_serializer().

When a method serializer is added, it will have the highest priority of all the serializers. You may use it to override the default Blacksmith serializer.

Now its time to add a dummy serializer.

from typing import Any, Dict, Optional, Sequence, Union

from blacksmith import AbstractHttpBodySerializer, register_http_body_serializer
from blacksmith.typing import Json


class MySerializer(AbstractHttpBodySerializer):
    def accept(self, content_type: str) -> bool:
        return content_type == "text/xml+dummy"

    def serialize(self, body: Union[Dict[str, Any], Sequence[Any]]) -> str:
        return "<foo/>"

    def deserialize(self, body: bytes, encoding: Optional[str]) -> Json:
        return {"foo": "bar"}


register_http_body_serializer(MySerializer())

Now, if a request contains a Content-Type text/xml+dummy it will be serialized using that serializer, and the body will always be <foo/>

Important

If a request receive a Content-Type that is not handled by any serializer, an runtime exception UnregisteredContentTypeException will be raised during the serialization.

the serializer implement a method blacksmith.AbstractHttpBodySerializer.deserialize() to handle responses deserialization.

If you request is talking to a specific request body, there is chance that the API respond in a similar format too, this is where the blacksmith.AbstractHttpBodySerializer.deserialize() will be used.