Django REST framework custom format for all out responses

Question

In my project I use DRF as backend and Angular as frontend.

Django==1.10 djangorestframework==3.7.1

I need all responses from DRF to be in the following format.

Answer 1

After some research I found a way to do this. I had to override the default behaviour of the ModelViewSet to output a different response.

I created a custom Response format initially:

class ResponseInfo(object):
    def __init__(self, user=None, **args):
        self.response = {
            "status": args.get('status', True),
            "error": args.get('error', 200),
            "data": args.get('data', []),
            "message": args.get('message', 'success')
        }

Then use this custom format in every method of the ModelViewSet:

class ResponseModelViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        self.response_format = ResponseInfo().response
        super(ResponseModelViewSet, self).__init__(**kwargs)

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response_data = super(ResponseModelViewSet, self).list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        self.response_format["data"] = response_data.data
        self.response_format["status"] = True
        if not response_data.data:
            self.response_format["message"] = "List empty"
        return Response(self.response_format)

    def create(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response_data = super(ResponseModelViewSet, self).create(request, *args, **kwargs)
        self.response_format["data"] = response_data.data
        self.response_format["status"] = True
        return Response(self.response_format)

    def retrieve(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response_data = super(ResponseModelViewSet, self).retrieve(request, *args, **kwargs)
        self.response_format["data"] = response_data.data
        self.response_format["status"] = True
        if not response_data.data:
            self.response_format["message"] = "Empty"
        return Response(self.response_format)

    def update(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response_data = super(ResponseModelViewSet, self).update(request, *args, **kwargs)
        self.response_format["data"] = response_data.data
        self.response_format["status"] = True

        return Response(self.response_format)

    def destroy(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response_data = super(ResponseModelViewSet, self).destroy(request, *args, **kwargs)
        self.response_format["data"] = response_data.data
        self.response_format["status"] = True
        return Response(self.response_format)

Answer 2

This would be more a more robust solution, as it can be used with Generic Views hassle free.

Also, the checks in render() can be easily altered as per the needs (Eg., handling no-2XX in this solution).

from rest_framework.renderers import JSONRenderer


class CustomRenderer(JSONRenderer):

    def render(self, data, accepted_media_type=None, renderer_context=None):
        status_code = renderer_context['response'].status_code
        response = {
          "status": "success",
          "code": status_code,
          "data": data,
          "message": None
        }

        if not str(status_code).startswith('2'):
            response["status"] = "error"
            response["data"] = None
            try:
                response["message"] = data["detail"]
            except KeyError:
                response["data"] = data

        return super(CustomRenderer, self).render(response, accepted_media_type, renderer_context)