Django API Forms

Django Forms approach in the processing of a RESTful HTTP request payload (especially for content type like JSON or MessagePack) without HTML front-end.

Motivation

The main idea was to create a simple and declarative way to specify the format of expecting requests with the ability to validate them. Firstly, I tried to use Django Forms to validate my API requests (I use pure Django in my APIs). I have encountered a problem with nesting my requests without a huge boilerplate. Also, the whole HTML thing was pretty useless in my RESTful APIs.

I wanted to:

• define my requests as object (Form),
• pass the request to my defined object (form = Form.create_from_request(request, param=param))),
• you can also pass any extra optional arguments
• validate my request form.is_valid(),
• extract data form.clean_data property.

I wanted to keep:

• friendly declarative Django syntax, (DeclarativeFieldsMetaclass is beautiful),
• Validators,
• ValidationError,
• Form fields (In the end, I had to "replace" some of them).

So I have decided to create a simple Python package to cover all my expectations.

Running Tests

# install all dependencies
poetry install

# run code-style check
poetry run flake8 .

# run the tests
poetry run python runtests.py