How do you implement custom response?

Question

I found that the DRF's return value could be various upon different occasions. So I want to make sure all my JSON return have "code" "message" or other values nested inside in order to keep consistency of my APIs.

For example:

Success

{"code": 1, "status": "success", "message": "", "data": [{"id": 1, "name": "John Doe", "email": "johndoe@gmail.com"}]}

Error

{"code": -1, "status": "error", "message":"Something went wrong","data": [] }

The return will always have "code" "status" "message" "data" inside whatever the result would become.

After looked up on Google but couldn't find any work-around over DRF. So I suppose everybody is redefining the APIViews or Mixins (get put post etc. ) to control the response. But I am not very sure if the return should be that widely different without a certain pattern. Or is it cool that DRF's JSON response could be directly adopted as a production case?

Hope to have some advice from you guys.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the status code of the HTTP to indicate the errors and success and you dont have to explicitly specify the error codes and response codes. In DRF status codes are defined in the module rest_framework.status and you should use them and form the response accordingly.