Caching

A certain woman had a very sharp consciousness but almost no memory … She remembered enough to work, and she worked hard.

  • Lydia Davis

Caching in REST Framework works well with the cache utilities provided in Django.

Using cache with apiview and viewsets

Django provides a ``method_decorator:doc:` <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/class-based-views/intro/#decorating-the-class>` to use decorators with class based views. This can be used with other cache decorators such as ``cache_page:doc:` <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/cache/#the-per-view-cache>`, ``vary_on_cookie:doc:` <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/decorators/#django.views.decorators.vary.vary_on_cookie>` and ``vary_on_headers:doc:` <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/decorators/#django.views.decorators.vary.vary_on_headers>`.

from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator
from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_page
from django.views.decorators.vary import vary_on_cookie, vary_on_headers

from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework import viewsets


class UserViewSet(viewsets.ViewSet):
    # With cookie: cache requested url for each user for 2 hours
    @method_decorator(cache_page(60*60*2))
    @method_decorator(vary_on_cookie)
    def list(self, request, format=None):
        content = {
            'user_feed': request.user.get_user_feed()
        }
        return Response(content)


class ProfileView(APIView):
    # With auth: cache requested url for each user for 2 hours
    @method_decorator(cache_page(60*60*2))
    @method_decorator(vary_on_headers("Authorization",))
    def get(self, request, format=None):
        content = {
            'user_feed': request.user.get_user_feed()
        }
        return Response(content)


class PostView(APIView):
    # Cache page for the requested url
    @method_decorator(cache_page(60*60*2))
    def get(self, request, format=None):
        content = {
            'title': 'Post title',
            'body': 'Post content'
        }
        return Response(content)

NOTE: The ``cache_page:doc:` <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/cache/#the-per-view-cache>` decorator only caches the GET and HEAD responses with status 200.

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