How does DRF know a simple POST request should call create()? - django

Question

I think this is best explained with a code example.
Angular makes a POST request like this:
$http.post('/api/accounts/', {
username: username,
password: password,
email: email
}
This gets picked up by Django in urls.py:
router = routers.SimpleRouter()
router.register(r'accounts', AccountViewSet)
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^api/', include(router.urls)),
]
Here's AccountViewSet:
class AccountViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
serializer_class = AccountSerializer
queryset = Account.objects.all()
lookup_field = 'username'
def create(self, request):
serializer = self.serializer_class(data=request.data)
if serializer.is_valid():
serializer.save()
return Response(
serializer.validated_data,
status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED
)
And here's the serializer:
class AccountSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = Account
def create(self, validated_data):
return Account.objects.create_user(**validated_data)
At no point in this code can I see something which translates to "if Angular sends a POST request to api/accounts/ which has a username, password and e-mail address, go ahead and create an account".
So my question is this:
How does DRF know to call AccountViewSet.create(), and where exactly is AccountSerializer.create() getting called?
There seems to be a lot of magic happening here.
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Generally, right REST API for each resource in most cases consists of 2 endpoints:
List/Create endpoint
Details (Retrieve/Update/Destroy) endpoint.
POST-request is used in the first one and is used for item creation.
More detailed on the endpoints, described above. URLs for the endpoints usually are almost the same, except of ID which is present in the second endpoint. For example:
/api/items/ — List/Create endpoint, with GET-request it will return list of items, with POST-request it will create a new item and return it serialized.
/api/items/<item_id>/ — Details endpoint, which allows us to deal with some item, identified by <item_id>. GET-request returns the item, PUT request updates the whole item (all required fields should be present in payload, if some non-required field is omitted — it's value will be set to None), PATCH-request allows to update item partially, only the provided in payload fields will be updated, all other fields will stay untouched) and DELETE request, obviously, deletes the item.
Such approach applies some limitations sometimes, but if you follow it — your code will stay slim and clear, because a lot of things will be done in generic way. Both on back-end and front-end parts of your project.