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+Returning URIs from your Web APIs
+=================================
+
+    "The central feature that distinguishes the REST architectural style from
+    other network-based styles is its emphasis on a uniform interface between
+    components."
+
+    -- Roy Fielding, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures
+
+As a rule, it's probably better practice to return absolute URIs from you web APIs, e.g. "http://example.com/foobar", rather than returning relative URIs, e.g. "/foobar".
+
+The advantages of doing so are:
+
+* It's more explicit.
+* It leaves less work for your API clients.
+* There's no ambiguity about the meaning of the string when it's found in representations such as JSON that do not have a native URI type.
+* It allows us to easily do things like markup HTML representations with hyperlinks.
+
+Django REST framework provides two utility functions to make it simpler to return absolute URIs from your Web API.
+
+There's no requirement for you to use them, but if you do then the self-describing API will be able to automatically hyperlink its output for you, which makes browsing the API much easier.
+
+reverse(viewname, request, ...)
+-------------------------------
+
+The :py:func:`~utils.reverse` function has the same behavior as :py:func:`django.core.urlresolvers.reverse` [1]_, except that it takes a request object and returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port::
+
+    from djangorestframework.utils import reverse
+    from djangorestframework.views import View
+   
+    class MyView(View):
+        def get(self, request):
+            context = {
+                'url': reverse('year-summary', request, args=[1945])
+            }
+
+            return Response(context)
+
+reverse_lazy(viewname, request, ...)
+------------------------------------
+
+The :py:func:`~utils.reverse_lazy` function has the same behavior as :py:func:`django.core.urlresolvers.reverse_lazy` [2]_, except that it takes a request object and returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.
+
+.. rubric:: Footnotes
+
+.. [1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse
+.. [2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse-lazy