Rest API Views

Provided with this app is a DRF ViewSet that provides clients to access their messages.

Through those endpoints, clients can list all of their messages (read and unread), retrieve a single message, and delete a message.

Endpoints

list: GET - List all messages for this context. (drf_messages:messages-list)

$ curl -X GET "http://127.0.0.1/messages/"

peek: GET - Get summary of unread messages for this context. (drf_messages:messages-peek)

$ curl -X GET "http://127.0.0.1/messages/peek/"

retrieve: GET - Retrieve specific message from this context. (drf_messages:messages-detail)

$ curl -X GET "http://127.0.0.1/messages/{id}/"

delete: DELETE - Delete a specific message from this context. (drf_messages:messages-detail)

$ curl -X DELETE "http://127.0.0.1/messages/{id}/"

Note

By default, clients are not allowed to delete messages that are unread. You can change this behavior by setting the MESSAGES_ALLOW_DELETE_UNREAD to True in your project’s settings.

List Filters

This module includes a predefined django-filter FilterSet. To use it, simply install django-filter in your project and the filters will be added automatically.

Install using pip with:

$ pip install django-filter

Then add ‘django_filters’ to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    'django_filters',
    # ...
]

Customize the views

Those views does not specify any permission classes, authentication classes, filters, pagination, versioning or any other optional extension.

Warning

Users can access only their messages or the messages of their current session when MESSAGES_USE_SESSIONS is configured to True. Unauthenticated users can practically access the endpoints, but will always receive an empty list or error 404.

Providing a permission class like IsAuthenticated is a good practice, but is not mandatory.

There are mainly two ways to customize those settings, configuring default settings for DRF or creating a custom ViewSet of your own.

Configuration of defaults for your views is done using the REST_FRAMEWORK setting in your project’s settings.py file. For example:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
        'rest_framework.authentication.TokenAuthentication',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_FILTER_BACKENDS': (
        'django_filters.rest_framework.DjangoFilterBackend',
        'rest_framework.filters.SearchFilter',
        'rest_framework.filters.OrderingFilter',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_VERSIONING_CLASS': 'rest_framework.versioning.NamespaceVersioning',
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS': 'rest_framework.pagination.LimitOffsetPagination',
    'PAGE_SIZE': 10,
}

Note

Note that django_filters is included in this example, and needs to be installed before use.

See also

See more in the Django Rest Framework docs https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/settings/

Alternatively, you can create your oen version of the MessagesViewSet and use it instead.

First at your views.py create a new ViewSet that extends the MessagesViewSet class.

from rest_framework.pagination import LimitOffsetPagination
from rest_framework.permissions import IsAuthenticated
from django_filters.rest_framework import DjangoFilterBackend

from drf_messages.views import MessagesViewSet


class MyMessagesViewSet(MessagesViewSet):
    permission_classes = (IsAuthenticated,)
    pagination_class = (LimitOffsetPagination,)
    filter_backends = (DjangoFilterBackend,)

Then at your urls.py create a router, register your custom view, and attach it to the urlpatterns. For example:

from rest_framework.routers import DefaultRouter

from myapp.views import MyMessagesViewSet

router = DefaultRouter()
router.register("messages", MyMessagesViewSet, "messages")


app_name = "myapp"
urlpatterns = [
    *router.urls,
]