Parse REST API: Proper way to query class object with ACL (python)
Question: There are three classes in my Parse database. For some reason, fetching data
from the second class ContactsData always returns an empty result. Would be
great if anyone could provide insights into the problem!

**1\. The default "Users" class**

No problems getting data from this class following examples at
<https://parse.com/docs/rest#users>

ACL column is empty

**2\. A custom "ContactsData" class. A user is allowed to add name and phone
of contacts through our iOS app**

Custom columns: name (string), phone (number)

ACL is write: true and read: true.

What I want to do: Fetch all contacts of a given user using python REST API.

**METHOD 1:**

    
    
    import json,httplib
    import apikeys
    import dataset
    
    MY_CLASS = '/1/classes/ContactsData'
    connection = httplib.HTTPSConnection('api.parse.com', 443)
    connection.connect()
    connection.request('GET', MY_CLASS, '', {
           "X-Parse-Application-Id": apikeys.PARSE_APP_ID,
           "X-Parse-REST-API-Key": apikeys.PARSE_REST_API_KEY,})
    
    parseData = json.loads(connection.getresponse().read())
    print parseData
    

Output:

    
    
    {'results':[]} 
    

Keep getting this even when there are objects in this class

**METHOD 2**

Also tried MY_CLASS = '/1/classes/ContactsData/ABCDEFG' where ABCDEFG is the
objectId of a particular object.

Output:

    
    
    {'code': 101, 'error': 'requested resource was not found'}
    

**3\. A custom "Testing" class**

Exactly the same as MY_CLASS. Just that I did not use ACL, and created the
object directly from the Parse dashboard. This time, I was able to get the
data using MY_CLASS = '/1/classes/Testing'


Answer: You're use REST calls without any logged in user/session-token, so you'll be
using default permissions. Unless you've set the class to allow anonymous
reads and the row ACL also doesn't restrict it, you wont get any data.

If you want to do the requests as a User that does have read rights to the row
you'll need to login and then use the session-token in the headers.

More information can be found here:

<https://parse.com/docs/rest#users>

