Developing REST API using functions in DRF application views

This post is in continuation with our previous post “Developing first REST API using Django Rest Framework ( DRF )” , in the previous post, we used class “UserInfoView” to write the views for our application “helloapp” , in this post, we will show how you can use functions instead of class to write the views.

Actually, functions are prior to class in Django Rest Framework, but since classes are most widely used, the use of functions in this post to write simple API is just for making your understanding much better with respect to how DRF views works and how those gets mapped to URL.

Since we have explained all the things in our previous post “Developing first REST API using Django Rest Framework ( DRF )” , you can find the code for this post at github https://github.com/lynxbee/drf_api_view_with_function.git and in this post, we will just explain the related changes..

$ vim helloproject/helloapp/views.py

from django.shortcuts import render
from rest_framework import viewsets
from django.http import HttpResponse, JsonResponse
from rest_framework.parsers import JSONParser

from helloproject.helloapp.models import UserInfo
from helloproject.helloapp.serializers import UserInfoSerializer

from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt

@csrf_exempt
def users(request):
    if request.method == 'GET':
        users = UserInfo.objects.all()
        serializer = UserInfoSerializer(users, many=True)
        return JsonResponse(serializer.data, safe=False)

    elif request.method == 'POST':
        data = JSONParser().parse(request)
        serializer = UserInfoSerializer(data=data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            serializer.save()
            return JsonResponse(serializer.data, status=201)
        return JsonResponse(serializer.errors, status=400)

@csrf_exempt
def user(request, pk):
    try:
        user = UserInfo.objects.get(pk=pk)
    except UserInfo.DoesNotExist:
        return HttpResponse(status=404)

    if request.method == 'GET':
        serializer = UserInfoSerializer(user)
        return JsonResponse(serializer.data)

    elif request.method == 'PUT':
        data = JSONParser().parse(request)
        serializer = UserInfoSerializer(user, data=data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            serializer.save()
            return JsonResponse(serializer.data)
        return JsonResponse(serializer.errors, status=400)

As you can see above, we have defined two functions “users” which just shows the list of all the users and this function doesn’t takes only one argument i.e. http request and second, “user” which takes two arguments, http request and primary key, which is used to identify the single user.

$ vim helloproject/helloapp/urls.py

from django.urls import include, path

from helloproject.helloapp import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('api-auth/', include('rest_framework.urls', namespace='rest_framework')),
    path('users/', views.users),
    path('user/<int:pk/>', views.user),
]

#!/bin/bash

API_URL="http://192.168.0.106:8000/users/"

username="lynxbee"
email="social(at)lynxbee.com"
age="35"

data="{\"username\":\"$username\",\"email\":\"$email\",\"age\":\"$age\"}"
echo $data

curl -v -k -H "\"Accept: application/json\"" -H "\"Content-Type:application/json\"" -d $data $API_URL

[{
	"id": 1,
	"username": "lynxbee",
	"email": "social(at)lynxbee.com",
	"age": "35"
}, {
	"id": 2,
	"username": "lynxbee",
	"email": "social(at)lynxbee.com",
	"age": "35"
}]

path('user/<int:pk/>', views.user)