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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][cite]
+
+As a rule, it's probably better practice to return absolute URIs from you web APIs, such as `http://example.com/foobar`, rather than returning relative URIs, such as `/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 use to easily do things like markup HTML representations with hyperlinks.
+
+REST framework provides two utility functions to make it more simple 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 it's output for you, which makes browsing the API much easier.
+
+## reverse(viewname, request, *args, **kwargs)
+
+Has the same behavior as [`django.core.urlresolvers.reverse`][reverse], except that it returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.
+
+ from djangorestframework.utils import reverse
+ from djangorestframework.views import APIView
+
+ class MyView(APIView):
+ def get(self, request):
+ content = {
+ ...
+ 'url': reverse('year-summary', request, args=[1945])
+ }
+ return Response(content)
+
+## reverse_lazy(viewname, request, *args, **kwargs)
+
+Has the same behavior as [`django.core.urlresolvers.reverse_lazy`][reverse-lazy], except that it returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.
+
+[cite]: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_1_5
+[reverse]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse
+[reverse-lazy]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse-lazy \ No newline at end of file