Creating a REST API Using URL Annotations

You may have noticed that the automatic URL generation is meant to be quick and easy-to-use for simple cases (creating an API in 15 minutes kind of thing).

It is more powerful though, however, as you can customize it to get the URLs for RequestHandlers how you want without having to make additions to output from routes.get_routes yourself. This is done through the use of “URL annotations”. APIHandler and ViewHandler have two “magic” attributes (__urls__ and __url_names__) that allow you to define custom routes right in the handler body. See relevant documentation in the REST API example in the demos.