DRF Request and Responses

Posted under » Django on 1 Oct 2021

From DRF Serialization II views, let us look at the Request object.

REST framework introduces a Request object that extends the regular HttpRequest, and provides more flexible request parsing. The core functionality of the Request object is the request.data attribute, which is similar to request.POST, but more useful for working with Web APIs.

• request.POST # Only handles form data. Only works for 'POST' method.
• request.data # Handles arbitrary data. Works for 'POST', 'PUT' and 'PATCH' methods.

REST framework provides two wrappers you can use to write API views.

• The @api_view decorator for working with function based views.
• The APIView class for working with class-based views.

These wrappers provide a few bits of functionality such as making sure you receive Request instances in your view, and adding context to Response objects so that content negotiation can be performed.

These wrappers provide a few bits of functionality such as making sure you receive Request instances in your view, and adding context to Response objects so that content negotiation can be performed.

The wrappers also provide behaviour such as returning 405 Method Not Allowed responses when appropriate, and handling any ParseError exceptions that occur when accessing request.data with malformed input.

Let us improve the list view.

from rest_framework import status
from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
from rest_framework.response import Response
from snippets.models import Snippet
from snippets.serializers import SnippetSerializer

@api_view(['GET', 'POST'])
def snippet_list(request):
    """
    List all code snippets, or create a new snippet.
    """
    if request.method == 'GET':
        snippets = Snippet.objects.all()
        serializer = SnippetSerializer(snippets, many=True)
        return Response(serializer.data)

    elif request.method == 'POST':
        serializer = SnippetSerializer(data=request.data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            serializer.save()
            return Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
        return Response(serializer.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

And the detail view

@api_view(['GET', 'PUT', 'DELETE'])
def snippet_detail(request, pk):
    """
    Retrieve, update or delete a code snippet.
    """
    try:
        snippet = Snippet.objects.get(pk=pk)
    except Snippet.DoesNotExist:
        return Response(status=status.HTTP_404_NOT_FOUND)

    if request.method == 'GET':
        serializer = SnippetSerializer(snippet)
        return Response(serializer.data)

    elif request.method == 'PUT':
        serializer = SnippetSerializer(snippet, data=request.data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            serializer.save()
            return Response(serializer.data)
        return Response(serializer.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

    elif request.method == 'DELETE':
        snippet.delete()
        return Response(status=status.HTTP_204_NO_CONTENT)

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