Django rest framework api_view vs normal view

Question

I have been looking everywhere to find a decent explanation for this, and they all come short...When do you use the @api_view decorator rather than a class based view wi

Answer 1

Personally, I use the APIView Base Class or @api_view decorator only when I need to do something very specific/custom. For example, to show a list of URLS of the endpoint, aggregate data from different models in a particular manner and so on.

Whenever I deal with usual list, create, update and delete operations I use the other classes (Retrieve, Create, Update and Destroy Views or Mixins).

Example of use of @api_view decorator to make a list of all the endpoints of my app:

from django.core.urlresolvers import NoReverseMatch

from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework.reverse import reverse

from .urls import urlpatterns


@api_view(('GET',))
def root_endpoint(request, format=None):
    """
    List of all the available resources of this RESTful API.
    """
    endpoints = []

    # loop over url modules
    for urlmodule in urlpatterns:

        # is it a urlconf module?
        try:
            urlmodule.urlconf_module
            is_urlconf_module = True
        except AttributeError:
            is_urlconf_module = False

        # if url is really a urlmodule
        if is_urlconf_module:

            # loop over urls of that module
            for url in urlmodule.urlconf_module.urlpatterns:

                # TODO: configurable skip url in settings
                # skip api-docs url
                if url.name in ['django.swagger.resources.view']:
                    continue

                # try adding url to list of urls to show
                try:
                    endpoints.append({
                        'name': url.name.replace('api_', ''),
                        'url': reverse(url.name, request=request, format=format)
                    })
                # urls of object details will fail silently (eg: /nodes//)
                except NoReverseMatch:
                    pass


    return Response(endpoints)

This code is on github.