How to modify Django Rest Framework incoming request? - django

I am building a web app using Django that is pretty much only serving as the API server. I have a single-page application that connects to it as well as an Android client. I have a need to modify some of the incoming POST requests that are coming through.
My two use cases:
If during the registration process the user does not select an avatar image to upload (which is a simple TextField that is the URL to the image), I should be able to insert the default avatar URL. So something like if request.data["avatar"] is None: <use default>
The incoming "timestamp" requests from the Android client are all unix timestamps. I would like to convert this to Django's datetime on the fly - so, current request comes in with date_time = 1473387225, I'd like to convert that to a DateTime object.
Now, I'm already doing something similar for certain POST parameters. The way I do it right now is in the post() function of my generic ListCreateApiView I would directly modify the request object and then call the self.create() with that new request object. Is this the right way, or is there a much better way to do it?
Thanks!

If you are using django-rest-framework these things can be done by serializers.
For avatar use an URLField with default value.
For the timestamp you should probably create a custom field.

Check out this site: http://www.cdrf.co It is an easily navigable display of all the methods available on a given class. You can simply use this to overwrite the View you are using. If a model ViewSet, you likely want perform_create and perform_update.
I often do something like this:
class SomeViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
queryset = SomeModel.objects.all()
serializer_class = SomeModelSerializer
def perform_create(self, serializer):
data = self.request.data
# make some changes to self.request here
serializer.save(
#change some things here
field='some new value'
)

You can do this in a number of ways. As a part of your validation or in the to_internal_value of the request serializer or in a custom field serializer.
Heres an example of doing this as a part of a custom field serializer.
class AccountCreationSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
avatar = AvatarField(
required=False
allow_files=True
)
# Custom Field Serializer
class AvatarField(serializers.FilePathField):
def to_internal_value(self, value):
user_defined_path = super(AvatarField, self).to_internal_value(value)
if user_defined_path:
return user_defined_path
return default_path

Related

How can I pass dictionary in Django Rest Framework?

In django, I was able to pass data using dictionary. Like I set the objects in my dictionary and pass it in return render and call the object in frontend (return render(request, 'c.html', context) right? so How can I do this in django rest?
You may return Response in rest framework like this if you are using django rest framework.
context = {'key':'value'}
return Response(context)
Or if you are using a serializer then
return Response(serializer.data)
In Django REST Framework the concept of Serializing is to convert DB data to a datatype that can be used by javascript. Every serializer comes with some field that is going to be processed. For example, if you have a class with the name Employee and its fields as Employee_id, Employee_name, is_admin, etc. Then, you would need AutoField, CharField, and BooleanField for storing and manipulating data through Django. Similarly, serializer also works with the same principle and has fields that are used to create a serializer.
DictField is basically a dictionary field that validates the input against a dictionary of objects. It has the following arguments:
child and allow_empty like this>>>
field_name = serializers.DictField(*args, **kwargs)
for example document = DictField(child=CharField())
you can use serializer like below>>>
from rest_framework import serializer
class Any(object):
def __init__(self, dictonary):
self.dict = dictionary
class AnySerializer(serializers.Serializer):
dictionary = serializers.DictField(
child = serializers.CharField())
you can visit similar problem for understanding through the real problem.
And this link is the complete documentation of your problem. You can check this out.

How to do an Ajax form field on Flask Admin

I'm building a Flask-Admin app that uses a REST API as its backend database, which I've implemented as my own BaseModelView. I've got it working with a custom model, and implemented all the functions to edit and save the model.
However I have one field, User, which needs to search another REST API endpoint for a User ID based on name/email, and as the list of users is expected to become quite large I want that field to be an AJAX lookup as I've seen in the SQLAlchemy example looking up a foreign key via Select2/Ajax.
As I need my own Ajax lookup, from following the docs and reading through the code, I'm struggling to find a working example of how to implement it myself and was wondering if anyone can direct me.
I've tried implementing an AjaxSelectField and using the form_ajax_refs property of BaseModelView to override the User field of the form (created in the scaffold_form method) without success.
Does anyone have an example of how I can put a custom Select2 Ajax lookup field, that looks up data from a REST API, on my model form so I can search for a User ID to assign to the model when I create/edit a model?
Figured it out finally, you have to add 2 things to your BaseModelView to do this:
In your BaseModelView class - Add an AjaxSelectField to your form with a custom model form:
def scaffold_form(self):
class AccountForm(Form):
owner = AjaxSelectField(UserAjaxModelLoader('owner'),
label='Owner', blank_text="Select User...")
return AccountForm
Then add a reference to your form_ajax_refs field:
form_ajax_refs = {
'owner': UserAjaxModelLoader('owner')
}
Finally the implementation of the UserAjaxModelLoader class which provides the AJAX endpoint and strings it all together:
from flask_admin.model.ajax import AjaxModelLoader, DEFAULT_PAGE_SIZE
class UserAjaxModelLoader(AjaxModelLoader):
def __init__(self, name, **options):
super(UserAjaxModelLoader, self).__init__(name, options)
def format(self, model):
if model:
return (model.uid, model.email)
return None
def get_one(self, pk):
return auth.get_user(pk)
def get_list(self, query, offset=0, limit=DEFAULT_PAGE_SIZE):
# Put your code to search REST API for users here
return users

Django rest framework hyperlinkrelatedfield for one table using primary key

I have a table called 'users' and 'location'. Users table has a foreign key that relates to location table. I have a users serializer to get the JSON. What would I do to get the hyperlinks for the users table using its primary key?
In django rest framework documentation, I couldn't find a solution. I tried using hyperlinkrelatedfield. But still I couldn't achieve this. Can someone help me in finding the solution?
Using rest-framework HyperlinkedRelatedField does not work because it was never built to expose the URL of the object being requested. Mainly because since the client already has the url of the user, why send it back again? Nevertheless you can achieve this by doing something like this.
class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
user_url = serializers.SerializerMethodField()
class Meta:
model = User
def get_label_location(self, obj):
return HyperlinkedRelatedField(view_name='user-detail',
read_only=True) \
.get_url(obj, view_name='label-detail',
request=self.context['request'], format=None)
Take note on a few things,
view-name param to the HyperlinkedRelatedField should be based on your url configuration
read-only has to be true since otherwise you'll have to specify the queryset. But since we have the object needed to generate the url we can ignore that.
I've set format param to None but you might want to set it based on your settings.
You can read up about SerializerMethodField here.

How to serialize data not coming from the request and properly validate it (ModelSerializer in Django Rest Framework)?

Using Django Rest Framework 3, Function Based Views, and the ModelSerializer (more specifically the HyperlinkedModelSerializer).
When a user submits a form from the client, I have a view that takes the request data, uses it to call to an external API, then uses the data from the external API to populate data for a model serializer.
I believe I have this part working properly, and from what I read, you are supposed to use context and validate()
In my model serializer, I have so far just this one overidden function:
from django.core.validators import URLValidator
def validate(self, data):
if 'foo_url' in self.context:
data['foo_url'] = self.context['foo_url']
URLValidator(data['foo_url'])
if 'bar_url' in self.context:
data['bar_url'] = self.context['bar_url']
URLValidator(data['bar_url'])
return super(SomeSerializer, self).validate(data)
Just in case, the relevant view code is like so:
context = {'request': request}
...
context['foo_url'] = foo_url
context['bar_url'] = bar_url
s = SomeSerializer(data=request.data, context=context)
if s.is_valid():
s.save(user=request.user)
return Response(s.data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
Now assuming I have the right idea going (my model does populate its foo_url and bar_url fields from the corresponding context data), where I get confused is how the validation is not working. If I give it bad data, the model serializer does not reject it.
I assumed that in validate(), by adding the context data to the data, the data would be checked for validity when is_valid() was called. Maybe not the case, especially when I print out s (after using the serializer but before calling is_valid()) there is no indication that the request object's data has been populated with the context data from validate() (I don't know if it should be).
So I tried calling the URLValidators directly in the validate() method, but still doesn't seem to be working. No errors despite giving it invalid data like 'asdf' or an empty python dict ({}). My test assertions show that the field indeed contains invalid data like '{}'.
What would be the proper way to do this?
You're not calling the validator.
By doing URLValidator(data['bar_url']) you're actually building an url validator with custom schemes (see the docs) and that's it. The proper code should be:
URLValidator()(data['bar_url'])
Where you build a default url validator and then validate the value.
But anyway I would not use this approach, what I would do instead is directly add the extra data (not using the context) and let DRF do the validation by declaring the right fields:
# Somewhere in your view
request.data['bar_url'] = 'some_url'
# In serializer:
class MySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
bar_url = serializers.URLField()
class Meta:
fields = ('bar_url', ...)
To answer your comment
I also don't understand how this also manages to make it past the
Django's model validation
See this answer:
Why doesn't django's model.save() call full_clean()?
By default Django does not automatically call the .full_clean method so you can save a model instance with invalid values (unless the constraints are on the database level).

Django rest framework: automatically create a url for each field of a model

I have large table of data (~30 Mb) that I converted into into a model in Django. Now I want to have access to that data through a REST API.
I've successfully installed the Django REST framework, but I'm looking for a way to automatically create a URL for each field in my model. My model has about 100 fields, and each field has about 100,000 entries.
If my model is named Sample,
models.py
class Sample(models.Model):
index = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True)
year = models.IntegerField(blank=True, null=True)
name = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
...97 more fields...
then I can access the whole model using Django REST framework like this:
urls.py
class SampleSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = Sample
fields = ( **100 fields**)
class SampleViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
queryset = Sample.objects.all()
serializer_class = SampleSerializer
router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'sample', SampleViewSet)
But of course my browser can't load all of that data in a reasonable amount of time. I could manually make a different class and URL for each field, but there must be a better way... I want to be able to go to my_site.com/sample/year (for example) and have it list all of the years in JSON format, or my_site.com/sample/name and list all the names, etc.
Please help me figure out how to do this, thanks!
You might be able to do that using a custom viewset route.
You have this:
class ModelViewSet(ModelViewSet):
#list_route()
def sample_field(self, request):
desired_field = request.data.get('field', None)
if not desired_field:
return response # pseudocode
values = Model.objects.all().values_list(desired_field, flat=True)
# serialize this for returning the response
return Response(json.dumps(values)) # this is an example, you might want to do something mode involved
You will be able to get this from the url:
/api/model/sample_field/?field=foo
This extra method on the viewset will create a new endpoint under the samples endpoint. Since it's a list_route, you can reach it using /sample_field.
So following your code, it would be:
mysite.com/sample/sample_field/?field='year'
for example.
There are many interesting details in your question, but with this sample I think you might able to achieve what you want.
Try to use pagination. You can do it in almost the same way as in you question. Pagination in django lets you divide the results into pages. You don't have to display all the entries in the same page. I think this is the best option for you.
Refer django documentation on pagination:
Pagination in django