return html in flask-restful

[ZimmerHao]

how can i return html directly in flask-restful. For example, my index.html is in /xxx/index.html, and how can i make a response to return the html directly not use render_template.

[justanr]

There's a method Api.representation that you'll want to look into. However, you'll need some way of mapping routes to templates. I'd recommend using flask.request.endpoint which tells you where the request was routed to. You could do something as simple as a dictionary that maps these endpoints to templates, maybe something like:

_endpoint_templates = {
    'main.index': 'index.html',
    'user.profile': 'profile.html',
    'default': 'default.html'
}

@api.representation('text/html')
def render_endpoint_template(data, code, headers):
    template = _endpoint_templates.get(request.endpoint, _endpoint_templates['default'])
    return render_template(template, **data), code, headers

Pretty low tech, but I'd imagine it'd go a fair distance. You'd probably want some way of automatically associating templates with endpoints so you're not constantly having to update the dictionary.

[joshfriend]

@justanr's solution would probably work (though it's probably not very robust). I think you could also return a Response object from the endpoint with the HTML already rendered and Flask-RESTful won't try to serialize it to JSON.

Either way, Flask-RESTful isn't the tool you want to use for rendering webpages.

[justanr]

I could see a use case for returning HTML or JSON or something else depending on the Accept header sent in. Think using reddit's .json URLs except responding to headers. Though you're right, a more robust solution would be needed.