Extra Actions For Routing

We can use @action decorator to add extra actions which can work for single object or an entire collection. In order to indicate the intend, we need to set detail argument which can be either True or False . If we set detail=True, the router configures it’s URL pattern accordingly and requires pk in URL patterns.

views.py

from rest_framework import status
from rest_framework.decorators import action
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework.viewsets import ModelViewSet
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

from ExtraAction.serializers import UserSerializer, PasswordSerializer


class UserViewSet(ModelViewSet):
    queryset = User.objects.all()

    def get_serializer_class(self):
        if self.action == 'set_password':
            return PasswordSerializer
        return UserSerializer

    @action(detail=True, methods=['post'])
    def set_password(self, request, pk=None):
        user = self.get_object()
        serializer = self.get_serializer(data=request.data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            user.set_password(serializer.validated_data['password'])
            user.save()
            return Response({'status': 'password set'})
        else:
            return Response(serializer.errors,
                            status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

    @action(detail=False, methods=['get'])
    def recent_users(self, request):
        recent_users = User.objects.all().order_by('-last_login')

        page = self.paginate_queryset(recent_users)
        if page is not None:
            serializer = self.get_serializer(page, many=True)
            return self.get_paginated_response(serializer.data)

        serializer = self.get_serializer(recent_users, many=True)
        return Response(serializer.data)

Note:Action decorator routes GET request by default but it can also accept other HTTP methods by setting methods argument.

serializers.py

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from rest_framework import serializers
from rest_framework.serializers import ModelSerializer


class UserSerializer(ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = '__all__'


class PasswordSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    password = serializers.CharField()

urls.py

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path
from .views import UserViewSet
from rest_framework.routers import DefaultRouter
router = DefaultRouter()
router.register('user', UserViewSet, basename='user')


urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls)
] + router.urls

Now, the two action set_password and recent_users will be available at the url ^/user/1/set_password/ and ^/user/recent_users/.

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