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Django Rest Framework - Details ​

Responses ​

  • the Response class cannot natively handle complex datatypes such as Django model instances, so you need to serialize the data before creating the Response object.

Views ​

.handle_exception() ​

Any exception thrown by the handler method will be passed to this method - returns a Response instance, or re-raises the exception - to customize the error responses, subclass this method

The default implementation handles any subclass of rest_framework.exceptions.APIException, as well as Django's Http404 and PermissionDenied exceptions, and returns an appropriate error response.

Policy Decorators ​

The ones that end with _class expect a single class while the ones ending in _classes expect a list or tuple of classes.

py
@renderer_classes(...)
@parser_classes(...)
@authentication_classes(...)
@throttle_classes(...)
@permission_classes(...)
@content_negotiation_class(...)
@metadata_class(...)
@versioning_class(...)

GenericAPIView ​

Base Classes ​

Concrete view classes can be imported from rest_framework.generics. It is also possible to create custom base classes that inherit class functionality from one of the concrete views.

Attributes for Controlling View Behavior ​

  • queryset: Used for returning objects from this view. Typically, you must either set this attribute, or override the get_queryset() method.

    • If overridden it is important that you call get_queryset() instead of accessing this property directly

      Anti-pattern

      py
      self.queryset

      Best Practice

      py
      self.get_queryset()

    • when overridding the listing can be optimized to avoid N + 1 queries

      • select_related: will fetch related objects in the same query
      • prefetch_related: will efficiently load collections of related objects
      • select_related and prefetch_related can be chained
  • serializer_class: The serializer class that should be used for validating and deserializing input, and for serializing output
  • lookup_field: The model field used for performing object lookup of individual model instances, defaults to 'pk'
  • lookup_url_kwarg: The URL keyword argument that should be used for object lookup. Defaults to using the same value as lookup_field.

Save and Delete Hooks ​

  • perform_create, perform_update, perform_destroy
    • particularly useful when setting attributes that are in the request but not the request data like request.user
    • also useful for adding behavior that occurs before or after saving an object like logging the change or sending an email
    • lastly they are a good place to add additional validation by adding ValidationError conditions

Mixins ​

There are mixins that can be imported from rest_framework.mixins but it is possible to make custom mixins that can be inherited by views.

Classes and Mixins ​

It is common to combine custom classes and mixins to create desired custom functionality.

Viewsets ​

Larger topic

Routers ​

Larger topic

Parsers ​

Small topic

Renderers ​

Large topic

Serializers ​

Very large topic

Serializer Fields ​

Very large topic

Serializer Relations ​

Very large topic

Validators ​

Large topic

Authentication ​

Large topic

Permissions ​

Large topic

Caching ​

Small topic

Throttling ​

Small topic

Filtering ​

Large topic

Pagination ​

Large topic

Versioning ​

Small topic

Content Negotiation ​

Small topic

Metadata ​

Small topic

Format Suffixes ​

Small topic

Returning URLs ​

Small topic

Exceptions ​

Small topic

Testing ​

Very large topic

Settings ​

Very large topic