Django REST framework 3.5¶

Funding¶

The 3.5 release would not have been possible without our collaborative funding model. If you use REST framework commercially and would like to see this work continue, we strongly encourage you to invest in its continued development by **signing up for a paid plan**.

:raw-html-m2r:`<ul class=”premium-promo promo”>

<li><a href=”https://www.rover.com/careers/” style=”background-image: url(https://fund-rest-framework.s3.amazonaws.com/rover_130x130.png)”>Rover.com</a></li> <li><a href=”https://sentry.io/welcome/” style=”background-image: url(https://fund-rest-framework.s3.amazonaws.com/sentry130.png)”>Sentry</a></li> <li><a href=”https://getstream.io/?utm_source=drf&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=drf” style=”background-image: url(https://fund-rest-framework.s3.amazonaws.com/stream-130.png)”>Stream</a></li> <li><a href=”https://www.machinalis.com/#services” style=”background-image: url(https://fund-rest-framework.s3.amazonaws.com/Machinalis130.png)”>Machinalis</a></li>

</ul>`

Many thanks to all our :doc:`sponsors <https://fund.django-rest-framework.org/topics/funding/#our-sponsors>`, and in particular to our premium backers, :doc:`Rover <https://www.rover.com/careers/>`, :doc:`Sentry <https://sentry.io/welcome/>`, `Stream <https://getstream.io/?utm_source=drf&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=drf>`_, and :doc:`Machinalis <https://www.machinalis.com/#services>`.

Improved schema generation¶

Docstrings on views are now pulled through into schema definitions, allowing you to use the schema definition to document your&nbsp;API.

There is now also a shortcut function, get_schema_view(), which makes it easier to adding schema views to your API.

For example, to include a swagger schema to your API, you would do the following:

• Run pip install django-rest-swagger.

• Add 'rest_framework_swagger' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

• Include the schema view in your URL conf:

from rest_framework.schemas import get_schema_view
from rest_framework_swagger.renderers import OpenAPIRenderer, SwaggerUIRenderer

schema_view = get_schema_view(
    title='Example API',
    renderer_classes=[OpenAPIRenderer, SwaggerUIRenderer]
)

urlpatterns = [
    path('swagger/', schema_view),
    ...
]

There have been a large number of fixes to the schema generation. These should resolve issues for anyone using the latest version of the django-rest-swagger package.

Some of these changes do affect the resulting schema structure, so if you’re already using schema generation you should make sure to review the deprecation notes, particularly if you’re currently using a dynamic client library to interact with your API.

Finally, we’re also now exposing the schema generation as a publicly documented API, allowing you to more easily override the behaviour.

Requests test client¶

You can now test your project using the requests library.

This exposes exactly the same interface as if you were using a standard requests session instance.

client = RequestsClient()
response = client.get('http://testserver/users/')
assert response.status_code == 200

Rather than sending any HTTP requests to the network, this interface will coerce all outgoing requests into WSGI, and call into your application directly.

Core API client¶

You can also now test your project by interacting with it using the coreapi client library.

# Fetch the API schema
client = CoreAPIClient()
schema = client.get('http://testserver/schema/')

# Create a new organisation
params = {'name': 'MegaCorp', 'status': 'active'}
client.action(schema, ['organisations', 'create'], params)

# Ensure that the organisation exists in the listing
data = client.action(schema, ['organisations', 'list'])
assert(len(data) == 1)
assert(data == [{'name': 'MegaCorp', 'status': 'active'}])

Again, this will call directly into the application using the WSGI interface, rather than making actual network calls.

This is a good option if you are planning for clients to mainly interact with your API using the coreapi client library, or some other auto-generated client.

Live tests¶

One interesting aspect of both the requests client and the coreapi client is that they allow you to write tests in such a way that they can also be made to run against a live service.

By switching the WSGI based client instances to actual instances of requests.Session or coreapi.Client you can have the test cases make actual network calls.

Being able to write test cases that can exercise your staging or production environment is a powerful tool. However in order to do this, you’ll need to pay close attention to how you handle setup and teardown to ensure a strict isolation of test data from other live or staging data.

RAML support¶

We now have preliminary support for RAML documentation generation.

Further work on the encoding and documentation generation is planned, in order to make features such as the ‘Try it now’ support available at a later date.

This work also now means that you can use the Core API client libraries to interact with APIs that expose a RAML specification. The RAML codec gives some examples of interacting with the Spotify API in this way.

Validation codes¶

Exceptions raised by REST framework now include short code identifiers. When used together with our customizable error handling, this now allows you to modify the style of API error messages.

As an example, this allows for the following style of error responses:

{
    "message": "You do not have permission to perform this action.",
    "code": "permission_denied"
}

This is particularly useful with validation errors, which use appropriate codes to identify differing kinds of failure…

{
    "name": {"message": "This field is required.", "code": "required"},
    "age": {"message": "A valid integer is required.", "code": "invalid"}
}

Client upload & download support¶

The Python coreapi client library and the Core API command line tool both now fully support file uploads and downloads.

Deprecations¶

from rest_framework.schemas import get_schema_view
from my_project.routers import router

schema_view = get_schema_view(title='Example API')

urlpatterns = [
    path('', schema_view),
    path('', include(router.urls)),
]