Creating the model

Now, we will create a simple NotificationModel class that we will use to represent notifications. Remember that we won't be persisting the model in any database or file, and therefore, in this case, our class will just provide the required attributes and no mapping information. Create a new models.py file in the service folder. The following lines show the code that creates a NotificationModel class in the service/models.py file. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_2_01_01 folder, in the Flask01/service/models.py file:

class NotificationModel: 
    def __init__(self, message, ttl, creation_date, notification_category): 
        # We will automatically generate the new id 
        self.id = 0 
        self.message = message 
        self.ttl = ttl 
        self.creation_date = creation_date 
        self.notification_category = notification_category 
        self.displayed_times = 0 
        self.displayed_once = False 

The NotificationModel class just declares a constructor, that is, the __init__ method. This method receives many arguments and uses them to initialize the attributes with the same names: message, ttl, creation_date, and notification_category. The id attribute is set to 0, displayed_times is set to 0, and displayed_once is set to False. We will automatically increment the identifier for each new notification generated with API calls.