Always return namespaces in Django REST Framework

By default, when you hook up a model to Django REST Framework and run a query in JSON format, what you get is a list. E.g.

For GET localhost:8000/api/mymodel/

[
  {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
  {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
  {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
]

This isn't great because there's no good way to include other auxiliary data points that are relevant to this query. In Elasticsearch you get something like this:

{
  "took": 106,
  "timed_out": false,
  "_shards": {},
  "hits": {
    "total": 0,
    "hits": [],
    "max_score": 1
  }
}

Another key is that perhaps today you can't think of any immediate reason why you want to include some additonal meta data about the query, but perhaps some day you will.

The way to solve this in Django REST Framework is to override the list function in your Viewset classes.

Before

# views.py
# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

After

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super().list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        # Where the magic happens!
        return response

Now, to re-wrap that, the response.data is a OrderedDict which you can change. Here's one way to do it:

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super().list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        response.data = {
            'hits': response.data,
        }
        return response

And if you want to do the same the "detail API" where you retrieve a single model instance, you can add an override to the retrieve method:

def retrieve(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    response = super().retrieve(request, *args, **kwargs)
    response.data = {
        'hit': response.data,
    }
    return response

That's it. Perhaps it's personal preference but if you, like me, prefers this style, this is how you do it. I like namespacing things instead of dealing with raw lists.

"Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!"

From import this

Note! This works equally when you enable pagination. Enabling pagination immediately changes the main result from a list to a dictionary. I.e. Instead of...

[
  {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
  {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
  {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
]

you now get...

{
  "count": 3,
  "next": null,
  "previous": null,
  "items": [
    {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
    {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
    {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
  ]
}

So if you apply the "trick" mentioned in this blog post you end up with...:

{
  "hits": {
    "count": 3,
    "next": null,
    "previous": null,
    "items": [
      {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
      {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
      {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
    ]
  }
}