Python REST API date format

Question

I am working on a Python REST API project where I need to retrieve data from a database. the database table has timestamp column since the data needs to be record many times per day. Here is a part of the code below.

In this piece of code, I need the API to show me the data of the current day (instead of a certain date).

import requests
import datetime

# Using python requests library, set up GET request
payload = {'date1' : 'CURDATE()', 'date2' : 'CURDATE() + INTERVAL 1 DAY'}

# Send GET request to REST API
r = requests.get('http://localhost:8080/data', params=payload)

# Decode the JSON result of the GET request
rows = r.json()

# Loop through data and format the date string
for i in rows:
    i[0] = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(i[0]).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
print rows

In date1 and date 2 part, I used to use a certain date like 2013-12-30 and 2013-12-31, the program will return all the data from 2013-12-30. Right now when I try to ask the program to return whatever the data from the current day, the program gives me a blank result [] .

The code needs to talk to a database, but I doubt the problem comes from the database part. Hope everyone can help me. Thanks!

Answer 1

Generate your dates in your Python code instead of passing arbitrary SQL functions to your database for execution, which is very dangerous.

>> import datetime
>> today = datetime.date.today()
>> tomorrow = today + datetime.timedelta(days=1)
>> print today
2013-12-31
>> print tomorrow
2014-01-01

Now you can pass today and tomorrow as date strings (eg str(today) or '{0}'.format(today) to your web service.

As noted in the comments, your service is not RESTful. You may want to read up on REST before going much further.