Django Rest Framework - business action specific views? - rest

Question

I have a basic model based view that uses a model serializer:
class ActionItemTextSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
assignee_name = serializers.CharField(source='get_assignee_name')
class Meta:
model = ActionItem
fields = ('id', 'created_by', 'created_date', 'project', 'portfolio', 'name', 'description', 'parent', 'priority', 'status', 'assignee', 'assignee_name', 'wf_get_actions')
#depth = 1
class ActionItemViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
queryset = ActionItem.objects.all()
serializer_class = ActionItemTextSerializer
So when I go to /actionitems/ I get a list of them and when I go to /actionitems/5/ I will get details for an individual action item.
My action items can have specific actions associated with them - how do I go about extending all this to have the following:
GET /actionitems/5/assign and get model view for action item with id=5 but with additional data (I can add this via view's serializer I suppose)
PUT /actionitems/5/assign and trigger a view that will update the model data with PUT data and do an additional change to it based on the action key ('assign') passed to it?
Can I somehow extend the ModelViewSet so that it can return different serializer and perform different actions while PUT/POST etc based on the parameter after the /actionitems/5/? Or should I use a different approach here.

Answer 1

Django REST framework allows you to add "actions" to a ViewSet through the #detail_route decorator. You can read more about the decorator in the documentation for ViewSets and it requires the use of the built-in routers.
In order to support multiple request methods (PUT/POST), you are going to need to pass them in through the methods argument to the decorator. So you would be using
#detail_route(methods=['post', 'put'])
You can then route based on the method that is being used by checking request.method on the request that is passed in.