1 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/howto/reverse.rst b/docs/howto/reverse.rst
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..73b8fa4d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/howto/reverse.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+Returning URIs from your Web APIs
+=================================
+
+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:`~reverse.reverse` function has the same behavior as `django.core.urlresolvers.reverse`_, except that it takes a request object and returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port::
+
+    from djangorestframework.reverse 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:`~reverse.reverse_lazy` function has the same behavior as `django.core.urlresolvers.reverse_lazy`_, except that it takes a request object and returns a fully qualified URL, using the request to determine the host and port.
+
+.. _django.core.urlresolvers.reverse: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse
+.. _django.core.urlresolvers.reverse_lazy: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#reverse-lazy