What is the DRF way to return a list of items from a third party api?

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I have an endpoint where I need to make make a request to a third party API to get a list of items and return the results to the client.

Which of the following, or any other approach would be better suited to DRF?

  1. Make input parameter validation and the call to the third party API and in the view method, pass the list of items in the response to a serializer for serialization and return serializer data to the client
  2. Pass the request parameters to the serializer as write-only fields, make the field validation, api call and serialization in the serializer
  3. A mixture of 1 and 2; use 2 different serializers, one that takes request parameters as write only fields, validates input parameters and makes the request to the 3rd party api, and another serializer that takes the resulting list from the first serializer and serializes the items for use of client
django-rest-framework django python
1 Answers

Since your question not mentioning anything about writing data into DB, undoubtedly you can go with Method-1.

Let's look into this sample api, which return a list of items (a list api).

Case - 1 : We need show the same response as we got from third-party api
In that case, we don't need any serializer or serialization process, all we need is pass the data from third-party API to the client.

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


@api_view()
def my_view(request):
    tp_api = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts"
    response = requests.get(tp_api)
    return Response(data=response.json())


Case - 2 : If you don't need complete data, but few parts (id and body)
In this particular situation, you can go with pythonic loop or DRF serializer.

# using DRF serializer
from rest_framework import serializers


# serializer class
class Myserializer(serializers.Serializer):
    id = serializers.CharField()
    body = serializers.CharField()


@api_view()
def my_view(request):
    tp_api = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts"
    response_data = requests.get(tp_api).json()
    my_serializer = Myserializer(data=response_data, many=True)
    my_serializer.is_valid(True)
    return Response(data=my_serializer.data)

#Python loop way
@api_view()
def my_view(request):
    tp_api = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts"
    response_data = requests.get(tp_api).json()
    data = [{"id": res['id'], "body": res['body']} for res in response_data]
    return Response(data=data)


In case-2, I would reccomend to use DRF serializer, which does lots of things like validation, etc

When coming into your second approch, doing validation of the input data would depends on your requirement. As you said in comments, you need to provide some inputs to the third-party api. So, the validation should be carried out before accessing the third-party api


# Validation example
class MyInputSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    postId = serializers.IntegerField(max_value=10)


class MyOutputSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    id = serializers.CharField()
    body = serializers.CharField()


@api_view()
def my_view(request):
    input = MyInputSerializer(data=request.GET)
    input.is_valid(True)
    tp_api = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/comments?postId={}".format(input.data['postId'])
    response_data = requests.get(tp_api).json()
    my_serializer = MyOutputSerializer(data=response_data, many=True)
    my_serializer.is_valid(True)
    return Response(data=my_serializer.data)


Conclusion

The DRF is flexible enough to get desired output format as well as taking data into the system. In short, It all depends on your requirements

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