Renderers in Django Rest Framework
Renderers in Django are components that are responsible for taking the output of a view and converting it into a format that can be displayed by a client. Renderers are used to render views in various formats such as HTML, JSON, XML, CSV, etc.
Why do we need Renderers?
The purpose of a renderer is to convert the output of a view into a format that can be easily consumed by the client. For example, if a view is returning a list of objects, a renderer can be used to convert that list into JSON or XML format, which can be easily consumed by a client.
Renderers also provide a way to customize the format and content of the response. For example, a JSON renderer can be configured to include only certain fields or to format dates in a specific way.
How to use Renderers in Django?
Renderers can be used in Django by specifying them in the renderer_classes attribute of a view or viewset. For example:
from rest_framework import renderers, views
class MyView(views.APIView):
renderer_classes = [renderers.JSONRenderer]
def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
# Return JSON response
return Response({'hello': 'world'})In this example, we are using the JSONRenderer to render the response as JSON. If we wanted to render the response as HTML, we could use the TemplateHTMLRenderer instead:
class MyView(views.APIView):
renderer_classes = [renderers.TemplateHTMLRenderer]
template_name = 'my_template.html'
def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
# Return HTML response
return Response({'hello': 'world'})In this example, we are using the TemplateHTMLRenderer to render the response as HTML, using the my_template.html template.
Renderers can also be used with viewsets:
from rest_framework import viewsets
class MyViewSet(viewsets.ViewSet):
renderer_classes = [renderers.JSONRenderer]
def list(self, request):
# Return JSON response
return Response({'hello': 'world'})
In this example, we are using the JSONRenderer to render the response for the list action of the viewset.
Django also provides a default set of renderers that can be used out of the box, including JSONRenderer, XMLRenderer, BrowsableAPIRenderer, and TemplateHTMLRenderer.
