Combined ViewSet

[pomali]

Hi,
for a few days I was trying to come up with good solution to having multiple ViewSets with different serializers, permissions, etc. on the same url prefix (using router).

One solution is to override get_serializers, get_permissions, filter_queryset based on self.action, but solution that I imagined that would work was writing multiple ViewSets and combining them into one router url prefix.

I tried to create metaclass that would do this combining, like this

# views.py
class MyCombinedViewSet(
  MyOwnerActionsViewSet,
  MyReadViewSet, .....
  metaclass=CombinedViewSetMetaclass
):
    pass
    
 # urls.py
router.register(r"my-api", MyCombinedViewSet, "my-api")

I have somewhat working version, but now I hit a bump with correctly creating as_view()/dispatch() and started thinking that in the end it may be bad idea.

What are your thoughts? How bad idea is it?

More usecases:

• having permissions/serializers/... organized in classes
• having retrieve my (current user's) object instead of list (GET /my-api/) while creating/updating works there too (POST/PUT /my-api/)

[auvipy]

you can do it in your project or in a separate package. DRF do not intend to start new patterns at the stage of it lifecycle.

[pomali]

I agree with that, but I was curious about your thoughts. It seemed like the natural progression from ViewSets, but as tomchristie mentioned ViewSests can be a bit unclear, and this would make it even worse.

[auvipy]

viewsets has their own positive sides and some downsides too so it depends on solely your needs

[tomchristie]

Feedback... I'm not actually all that keen on ViewSet full stop. I think they make for really unclear code, and were arguably a mistake.

So, for my part, no I don't think it's likely to be a fantastic approach.

[pomali]

that is interesting, so preferred solution is using generic views and manually binding them to urls?

[gegoune]

This is very interesting point which many might be unaware of. Do you think documentation should discourage users from using ViewSets?

[tomchristie]

Eh, lots of other people would prob disagree with me, and find using them helpful so... 🤷🏼‍♂️
I don't particularly see us changing the documentation radically.

[auvipy]

Tom, viewsets has its own merits / positive sides as well. it depends on the need of the project / endpoint. let us not fully discourage it. those who need more higher level pattern, can build their own, out of the DRF package's scope. My 2 cents