How to implement multiple POST methods in CherryPy - cherrypy

Question

I am new to cherryPy and I am working on communicating the GUI with Python functions, for it I am using CherryPy. I have followed this cherryPy tutorial. In that the POST method don't do much just return some string, but in my case there can be many functions which will communicate with GUI using the POST. I tried this:
#cherrypy.expose
class StringGeneratorWebService(object):
#cherrypy.tools.accept(media='text/plain')
def GET(self):
return cherrypy.session['mystring']
def POST(self, counter,param):
if counter == 1:
function1(param) # call a python function
elif counter == 2:
function2(param)
elif counter == 3:
function3(param)
def PUT(self, another_string):
cherrypy.session['mystring'] = another_string
def DELETE(self):
cherrypy.session.pop('mystring', None)
In above code in POST method, the counter and Param are parameters from the AJAX request. According to the counter value I am calling the respective function. The Param can be a big JSON document. The above code works but this is very crude way to do this, so is there other way which is a good coding practice?

Answer 1

The documentation is a little confusing, but you only need to implement the GET/POST Python methods if you want CherryPy to call different functions for you based on the HTTP method. If you don't care about GET requests on your POST URLs you can just use the #cherrypy.expose pattern.
If you look at the tutorial source for forms there's this helpful bit about exposing POST methods:
[Using HTTP POST method] would not change your application’s exposed method because CherryPy handles both the same way and uses the exposed’s handler parameters to deal with the query-string (key, value) pairs.
Modifying the handler to include the method makes this clear:
class StringGenerator(object):
#cherrypy.expose
def generate(self, length=8):
return cherrypy.request.method + ' ' + ''.join(random.sample(string.hexdigits, int(length)))
Now I can use curl make a GET then a POST request:
$ curl "http://example.com:8888/generate?length=8" # does a GET
GET 78A35e4f
$ curl "http://example.com:8888/generate" --data "length=8" # does a POST
POST 14d0D92c